I thought I'd join in this thread as it was interesting, and I'd never actually given much thought to lights using more power than their rating. So I grabbed the table lamp and took it to our kitchen island, plugged in the Kill-A-Watt meter and started testing. So this is what happened with 3 light bulbs. Bulb 1 was an LED that we had in a can light over the sink, rated at 8 watts, bulb 2 was a spiral CFL from this lamp, rated at 10 watts and bulb 3 was a decorator type enclosed spiral CFL from over the dining room table rated at 14 watts. As the pictures show, my house is at ~120 volts and the wattages all tested good. The part I thought odd was bulb 3. It comes on dim and ramps up slowly to full brilliance and as such it stated at 10w and in about 30 seconds went to 14w. This caused me to go back and retest the other bulbs to make sure they had time to ramp up more if they were going to. They did not. Since pictures are worth 1000 words, here's a few thousand to look at
