How much do you spend on your lighting hobby? £ € $ ¥

[fluorescent]

Hi all,

I'm curious to know how much you spend on your lighting hobby/collection. I ask as when I started collecting, I honestly thought I'd spend £0 or very close to it, i.e. just getting old fittings from work & other jobs, and getting tubes & lamps from recycling bins.

...However, the bug bit a bit harder and I started scouring eBay etc. I've just tallied up how much I've spent in the last couple of months and yeah, it's a lot! And I've got some more purchases lined up very soon!

I realise talking about money can be considered rude or frowned upon, obviously if you don't want to talk about it you don't have to!

Curious,
Adam

[Slyspark]

More than I want to, that's for sure! Bloody eBay.......

[Danny]

I used to spend far too much on ebay as it became addictive. and i had cut down considerably over the past 3/4 years until i went a little mad on it last month. But with other things to concentrate on at the minute, lighting buys will have to take a back seat for now. Theres not much on there atm for me any way so that helps lol

[Andy]

I have to confess to spending far too much money on this hobby but it can be highly addictive.
It is easy to get carried away if you are not careful and I dread to think how much I must have spent over the last few years but I know it is at least a couple of thousand!

[RobTDCI]

I can honestly say that I have no idea. It varies so much really, this last couple of months I have been spending again, but I can quite easily go for many months without spending on lighting at all if nothing interesting turns up.

[fluorescent]

So it's not just me spending £hundreds, filling all my outbuildings with fluorescent fittings, tubes and other lighting stuff & thinking I'm going mad

I can't quite believe how addictive it is, I've got saved searches set up on eBay and pretty much every other selling sites that I know of & check them daily!

[Zelandeth]

It varies for me massively. It's not something that I generally spend much at all on most months, maybe save for the occasional high street or eBay purchase for less than a tenner because it was interesting. Some months though I'll burn through quite a bit, especially if something I really want turns up. If a couple of things on the wish list turn up together, that can make an expensive month!

Having said that, the lighting thing is undoubtedly the cheapest of my four main hobbies!

Cars are by far the worst (heck, insurance is more than £100 a month for the lot), must have spent best part of £500 in the first few months of this year getting bits in for the injection conversion on the Lada. The custom fuel line will probably be another ton once I've got the right fuel pump in...Saab has just blown its head gasket, and both it and the Skoda need an MOT. Cars are expensive. Even ones like the Lada, where parts are almost hilariously cheap.

Photography. Just yesterday dropped £65 on processing and some new film. Hard to say how regularly that will happen as I'm only just getting back into it...got some good shots at the Goodwood Festival of Speed though.

The other one involves an ongoing costume construction project, which has been an absolute cash-sink. I figured out pretty early on that throwing three or four grand at someone and just commissioning them to built it was a non-starter. So would have a go myself. Initial reaction a mix of "that's an interesting engineering challenge" and "oh god, what have you got yourself into this time?!?" - haven't decided yet which is the winner there yet!

I did go down a bit of a spendy route buying in some of the base parts in kit form (it saved me having to get stuff 3D printed, or faff around investing in yet more tools and materials I didn't have), which came in at about $300US. By the time I'd paid the import duty, VAT and shipping (note that you pay VAT on the shipping too!) that box of bits had cost me £350. The fabric was nearly that much again, and there have been a shed load of sundry items like glue sticks, thread for the seeing machine, random little tools I never realised I needed...I reckon if I added it all up there's probably well over a grand invested in there. Even the little stuff, a quid here, a fiver there...it adds up alarmingly fast. I've learned a heck of a lot though, and in a few years when it will probably need a major overhaul, the base framework can be reused - and one reason. I spent so much on the fabric was making sure I have plenty for repairs, as there's no guarantee that a year down the line that you'll be able to find a match.

That's before I even start looking at getting to any of the bigger conventions - we ran the math for one earlier this year, and for all four of us in the family to go would have probably been north of two grand - for a weekend in Birmingham! That's not even including a massive travel bill as it's just up the road! Yes, we could probably have done attending only without the hotel...but it's a long drive back when you've been running around flat out all day! Suffice to say, we're sticking to smaller events generally these days.

Moral of the story there though: always multiply your budget for a project by at least five compared to your original estimate!

Only other thing I really tend to buy is vinyl. That's probably £10 or less most months though, even though I have been grabbing some of the reissued albums lately, especially ones where the originals go for silly money but I still want. Usually though they're £0.50 apiece at the charity shop!

[Simon]

Not much really most items I have collected over a lifetime with the odd thing I have bought here and there. When I was a kid I usually asked for something lighting for Christmas one year I got a twin Crompack 2 !!

When I passed my driving test cars sort of took over to the point when I moved house to accommodate the American car I had at the time
hence my large garage.

[Zelandeth]

A large garage...now there's something I could wish for!

...or at least access to my normal sized one if I could clear the junk out of it...

[Keiron]

Not as much as I used to, the more lamps I get in my collection the harder it is to get the ones I haven't got! Always watching stuff on eBay but often miss the ending lol.
I can't remember a week going by where I haven't bought lamps, hopefully the weather will be nice tomorrow so that I can visit a couple of junk shops that save old lamps for me!