Hello everyone. New here, so essentially I am doing a little pet project of recreating a natural habitat for a reptile my friend is giving me. The enclosure is 4x2x2 but I plan on upgrading it eventually to an 8x4x4 or larger... as they grow rather large. So I thought about using these really high lumens light on a dimmer so that I don't have to keep buying new lights. While there are lights made for reptiles I wanted to try my hand at doing something myself. I am trying to make it so that this light could be used like a regular light fixture (think of an aquarium hoodlight or a lamp or something portable). I went to home depot, the guy told me if I wanted to do that I needed to get this thing with the 3 wires and make it so that I could wire that which has a 3 prong wall plug and attach it to a some wires in there.. I understand nothing about this, thought about hiring an electrician but some people are asking for 200$... so I thought I might give it a shot myself first.... I am hoping you guys could figure out how to work that out. Getting a plug-in type of dimmer... basically you plug the light into the dimmer, and the dimmer into an outlet.... [img]https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.doityourselft.com-vbulletin/698x665/light_stuff_2_c20f4b8c8d8d06c187907fd064926a81be16b9ec.jpg[/img] [img]https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.doityourselft.com-vbulletin/548x666/light_stuff_fdf384a3ddcb63d7f06ff488bcc0b3c4ed1b1c8c.jpg[/img] [img]https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.doityourselft.com-vbulletin/720x905/light_stuff_3_70eff4db1d31ad9c5be642c35d40bc4ca03bf698.jpg[/img] [img]https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.doityourselft.com-vbulletin/720x688/light_stuff_5_93145c6b4cba6d32beedd3c304f7a96a8c6c4a98.jpg[/img] [img]https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.doityourselft.com-vbulletin/706x818/light_stuff_4_7781a91edcab8bfefddfc3f9078ecb6455a8d36e.jpg[/img]

My house was built in the 1930s and has some electrical issues. Someday I will overhaul all the wiring, when I can afford to. In the meantime though I'd like to be able to solve a couple of small problems. One issue is a couple of the ceiling light fixtures keep causing new light bulbs to burn out. Sometimes it happens immediately, other times it takes a few times turning the light on and off. All the fixtures worked fine for years then suddenly there are these problems. Also some of the wall sockets will cause anything plugged into them to fry, or plugging something into them causes the outlet itself to stop working. My question is what causes these things to happen? I remember one time before I moved into the house, when it was rented to someone else but I owned it, a wall outlet went bad. A friend fixed it for me while I watched. I don't remember what he did, but I know it didn't take long and was pretty simple. Too bad that friend is no longer with us, so I can't ask him. Thanks for any help.