Love this little guy. For the price, it's fantastic. It was recommended to me by a friend, and I use it on my work table as a spot lamp. It has been great. Very, very bright for such a small lamp, and it is solidly constructed & points firmly wherever you direct it. I may get another for my desk. While it is bright, it is somewhat concentrated does not cover a huge area. Would be good for a desk lamp as it does not take up much surface space, and I find it extremely helpful as a task light for doing detail work. There is a tiny bit of assembly required, but I am a complete moron and it only took me about a minute to "assemble" the base. I highly recommend this little lamp.
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Backstory: I got two of these lamps, and both flickered from day 1. Hence the critique in this review cannot be dismissed as a one-off.
The lamp is as good as anything out there, once the switch is replaced. Seems Ikea -whose products are ever leading the race to the bottom in quality, consistency and durability -saves pennies per unit by using a very cheaply and poorly designed/manufactured switch. Surprised?
Easy to remedy, if you have an amateur's skill with electricals. The connection inside the switch is the "pinch" kind, aka "insulation displacement" type, which is why the light flickers or just stops working. Ikea could care less, of course. But there's no need to throw the lamp away, without at least giving this a try first.
Step by step fix for a flickering lamp.
Tools: phillips screw driver, wire cutters, wire strippers, hammer, eye protection
Go to a locally owned hardware store, and buy a Leviton single pole cord switch, cat no. 5410, or equivalent. Leviton 5410 Appliance Switch, Feed-Through Switch Rocker, Single Pole, Single Throw, 3A-125V AC, Brown (Don't buy the pinch kind. It won't work, since this lamp does not use standard gauge lamp wire. Also, I can't recommend buying an inline dimmer, since this is an Ikea product we're talking about, and it could easily melt or exude meatball gravy or lingonberry juice.)
Unplug the lamp, and remove the existing lamp switch by smashing it with a hammer. Yes, you have to smash it, don't cut the wire.
Put on safety glasses or some sort of eye protection, and hold the switch sideways (seam up) on something hard and well supported, like a concrete floor or doorway threshhold, not a table or countertop. Hammer the switch straight down on the seam. Two or three well placed whacks, and you get the halves to split open enough to tear them apart by hand.
You'll see two lines, one cut, the other continuous. Pull out both lines. Discard and banish all further thought of the now-broken and defeated carcass of the worthless Ikea switch.
Cut the ends of the already cut line, removing the "pinch" connectors. Discard those too. Don't cut the uncut half of the wire.
Strip the insulation from the ends you just cut, about 1/2 inch.
Unbolt the casing of the new switch, and you can easily see where your exposed wire ends should go. (Twisting your wire ends before wrapping and tightening under the lead screws helps. The Leviton thing comes with instructions and diagram, but you can ignore the polarity issue, the plug used in this lamp is not polarized.)
Put your new switch back together, and you should now have something almost no one else on Earth has even seen: an Ikea Jansjo lamp which will actually work -until the bulb burns out, that is. Guess I'll write another review when that time comes.
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I love this little lamp! Here in the Caribbean (where electricity costs 4-times what it did back in the states) you do everything you can to cut electric usage, and this little 4.2W LED lamp is perfect! It's quite bright for studying and also doesn't produce any noticeable heat. Assembly was easy (just screw in 2 phillips-head screws). So I ordered 3 more.
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Ikea merchandise often seems to me to be suitable mostly for those whose tastes match Ikea's eccentric design philosophy, but this particular product may not be right even for die-hard Ikea fans. A few things to consider before purchasing this product:
The gooseneck is about 19" long, meaning it's difficult to position without an unaesthetic, ungainly appearance.
The light beam is extremely narrow. At 8" above the desk, it illuminates only a 9" circle.
The switch is on the power cord, about 12" from the base, meaning one cannot hang the power cord off the back of the desk.
The lamp has a wall-wart power supply.
I'm sure the product is well made, but the design is really not suitable for my own, personal workspace.
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This lamp stopped working after about 1 month of extremely light use. We only used it for 15-30 mins each night to read his bedtime stories. The lamp is high on a table where my son cannot get to it.
Next time I was there, I bought the exact same lamp to replace the unusable one. Same thing: about a month later, it stopped working. It would spontaneously dim then not stay on at all.
I love IKEA. Half our furniture is from IKEA. This is the only IKEA product I've ever been disappointed with.
