This is where you can find the light bulbs one would commonly have in their house that I have microwaved. They include the standard 60 watt model, the small 10 watt "night light" model, and all in between.
For simplicity's sake, I will start with the 10 watt model, and move up from there.
This is a normal 10 watt "night light" light bulb. They get their name because they are mostly used in night lights. However they are also very popular in plastic Christmas decorations because of their small size and the small amount of heat they give off.
10 watt video
Our next entry is a standard 60 watt light bulb. Because these are very common, and useful, there are quite a few of these we have done experiments on.
The 60 watt light bulb is pretty much the light most people have somewhere in their house. Sure there are some 75 watt bulbs, and some 50 watt, and even some 100 watts. But in our experiments, they all perform the same. Also, when we get the bulbs 90% of the time the stamp saying the wattage is no longer visible. However we do try to distinguish them when we do the experiments.
These following two videos demonstrate the arcs of plasma inside the glass of the light bulb.
60 watt for 7 seconds
60 watt for 15 seconds
The green plates we used at the beginning of our research turned out to absorb much of the energy the microwave emits, and because of this we were able to microwave a light bulb for incredible lengths of time.
60 watt for 3 minutes
Normally, a light bulb will shatter due to the intense heat produced after about 20 seconds. At first we blamed this on the old microwave we choose as our main testing equipment. Over time though, after doing countless tests, and eventually after we did some research on the green plates, we found the true cause, the green plates were not microwave-safe, and absorbed too much of the energy. However, they allowed us to have some abnormally long light bulb experiments:
50 second video
27 second video
62 second video
Whithout the green plates, this is what will happen when a light bulb is placed in a microwave:
60 watt shatter
That being said, there are flukes in every experiment. One 60 watt bulb for lack of a better word, "popped" after only 4 seconds.
60 watt pop
This next bulb did more or less the same thing. This time it was a 40 watt light bulb.
40 watt pop
To try and get more interesting effects out of the 60 watt light bulb, we placed it on an empty film canister.
60 watt film canister
Not surprisingly, there was no visible change except for the intensity of the white light given off.
As a last ditch effort to get some interesting effects out of a 60 watt light bulb, we wrapped it in thin copper wire obtained from old computer parts.
Copper bulb video 1
Copper bulb video 2
The copper wire did it's job and provided us with an amazing light show. The heat it produced combined with the heat the light bulb normally produces, was hot enough to melt a hole in the glass of the light bulb, and fuse it to the tempered glass plate on the bottom of our microwave. Because it sealed the hole, the gases inside the light bulb weren't able to escape, and the plasma arcs still went on.
