Listen man, you do what you want. I’ve done some sketchy stuff myself.
Most people don’t care that it’s illegal, heck most people on here are pirates anyway.
People care about you, and they want you to understand the danger of what you’re doing.
Most of them aren’t judging you, I’m certainly not.
Will using PLA for a light enclosure definitely cause a fire? Probably not. The odds are very low. In fact the odds are very low that normal wiring in a normal enclosure will overheat. You’ll likely never see it.
The problem is the what if. The chance. IF the wiring shorts out, overheats, whatever. A normal enclosure might contain it completely. Or at worst it will resist catching on fire, and fill your house with smoke first, giving you time to realize what’s happening and save your life.
PLA will do neither of those things. It will in fact do the opposite. So in the admittedly rare chance that your wiring falls, and gets hot, PLA will actually readily ignite. And then, worse, it WILL drip flaming plastic onto the floor, causing it to spread immediately and without warning.
Your time to notice a fire and save yourself goes from minutes to seconds. It’s potentially the difference from waking up to a smoke alarm and a smokey house, to waking up to a smoke alarm and a wall of fire blocking your only exit.
I’m not trying to be extreme, it’s just the facts. That’s why people say codes are written in blood. The wrong plastics have been used before, and people have died, so now in many lands it’s a law.
No one is making you follow the law. They just want you to be informed, so that if you choose to continue, you do so without ignorance to the risks.
I wish you well.
Edit:
Now, if you changed the configuration of the lamp, if you put all the AC wiring and DC conversion circuits in a metal enclosure, and then ran low voltage wiring to low voltage bulbs, that would be still unwise, but significantly safer.
The concern is that AC circuits, while only using enough power to run a lamp in this scenario, have access to more than enough power to run a space heater. If your AC wiring becomes a space heater in your ceiling, nothing will stop it, and PLA will make it worse 🤷♂️
No worries, glad I could help.
I understand the frustration, I’ve had people do the same thing to me, make assumptions about what I was doing, putting words in my mouth and impugning my motives.
Text is hard to convey proper emotion, and even harder when you’ve got a bunch of people only typing half of their thought 🤷♂️
As for the design change, I honestly don’t know. It’s not actually my area of expertise, I just know enough to know what not to do.
I do know that the highest risk is in the connections themselves. A pair of insulated wires are unlikely to ever be an issue on their own, but where you connect the wires to the wiring of the house is the real issue.
Connections can loosen over time, through temp cycling or whatever reasons. And when they loosen, resistance goes up, and heat is generated.
So if it were my project, I’d probably try to find a small round electrical box that fits inside the decorative one. Either metal or the proper plastic. And then make those connections inside that box, and call it good enough.
Maybe make sure the edges of the pipe are smooth where the wires enter them, too, so the insulation doesn’t get shaved off when you’re moving it around.
Otherwise I really do like the project! Looks great! I hope you come up with a solution you’re comfortable with 👍