Luminair Eco Desk 36 Lamp Full Review
Posted: 06 February 2008 by Chris Haslam
We were genuinely excited by the arrival of the Eco Desk 36, as it combines three of the things we love -- high-tech low energy components, sustainable materials and traditional UK based carpentry. As a stand-alone piece of furniture, the dark walnut frame and hand turned shade contrast beautifully with the silver anodised joints (black also available) ensuring the lamp looks fantastic even before it gets switched on.
When we did stop drooling and plugged it in with the supplied 12v transformer, we couldn’t find the switch. After a moment of head scratching, we did the sensible thing and read the instructions. It turns out the LED bulb cluster has a touch sensitive metal centre -- pinch it once to turn on, pinch again to switch off -- and for the really clever bit, pinch and hold to adjust the brightness. Because LED bulbs never get more than warm this system is fun to use and totally safe.
As for the light itself, the 36 LED bulbs produce a warm, pleasingly bright effect. We tried the warm white bulb, but a brighter whiter light is also available. According to Luminair the strength of the light is 1200 lux at 50cm, which works out at about 50W -- unsuitable for main lighting but perfect for working and reading with. So it’s not only a functional light, but with a lifespan of more than 100,000 hours (11 years constant use!) and a maximum power usage of just 4.55W, it’s also amazingly efficient (most desk lamps use around 20W).
Unfortunately, while it might look a little like a classic angle-poised lamp, the Eco Desk 36 doesn’t always act like one. The three joints are secured together with shapely metal bolts and tough rubber spacers, so you can adjust them quite easily, but they do occasionally need tightening up to stop the lamp flopping down into a heap. Also the lightweight wooden tripod base isn’t very heavy, so raising the lamp requires two hands to stop you from lifting the whole lamp up. Minor niggles for something so sexy, but for £330 we’d expect it to work smoother than a £15 version from Ikea.
The attention to green details on the materials is very, very good. All the wood is FSC-certified, and aluminium is a minmimum 40 per cent recycled. At a company level, Lumaire practises what it preaches in its products, printing brochures on FSC paper and powering its offices from a green electricity tariff.
So far the desk lamp has ticked all the eco-boxes. It has sustainable materials, it's locally produced, use little energy and is long-lasting, but it does have one problem -- standby. Unless you switch the lamp off at the wall it will use 0.55W of power doing absolutely nothing. Now this seems crazy to us, especially for a product so totally green in every other way. Sure, 0.55W is an extremely low standby rate and overall this lamp is still far greener than most lights available, but unfortunately LED bulbs like this need to use energy hungry transformers to work properly.
Overall we can’t help but love this lamp. It isn’t the most user friendly design, or the best value, but few products -- eco or otherwise -- will have been built with such attention to detail. It looks stunning; the dimmer switch LED cluster works like a dream and the wood feels beautifully finished. You even get an impressive 4.5m power cord, which makes positioning it easier. It is undoubtedly expensive, but use it for four hours a day and it’ll still be going strong in 68 years time. At just £4.85 a year for life, the Eco Desk 36 may just be worth investing in.
Quality
Value
Ethics
Green
