This little project happened unexpectedly when I had an empty “scented oil” bottle and it reminded me of the clusters of designer pendant lights you find in lighting shops. The official ones tend to use suspended globes with small tungsten halogen lamps in them, which can be a bit too bright. But this version uses a small Molex style socket to allow the use of a standard LED.
This one is cheap and fun to make, and the LEDs can be easily changed.
Find your chosen style of bottle and make sure you can fit an LED and 0.1″ (2.54mm) pitch 2-way Molex connector into its neck. The Molex style connectors can be trimmed to a degree to make them fit as shown in the video.
Use some thin flexible wire to connect to the Molex crimps, either by crimping them using a suitable tool or by carefully soldering them in.
Drill a small 3mm 1/8″ hole in the bottles lid, remove any sharp edges and then thread the wires through.
To make a ceiling mount you could use small hooks or a panel of wood with holes drilled at appropriate spacings. Power your lights from a spare USB power supply with a resistor in series with each light. A good average value for a 5V supply would be 120 ohm. You can run up to 20 pendants from a 500mA power supply if you have the patience to make them.
Long leads are nicer because the lamps will swing slightly in any air turbulence in the room. You can either leave the wires as a loose pair or twist them together. Twisting two single wires together over long runs can be quite a task!
If desired, you can add things like small glass beads into the bottles too for extra weight or visual effect. The LEDs are easily changed by just unscrewing the bottle from its cap and plugging a new LED in with the correct polarity. You could use standard lensed LEDs, flat top LEDs, “strawhat” LEDs (my choice) or side emitting LEDs if you can find them.
