Stop Fighting With Your IR Heater Sockets
If you’ve ever tried to swap out IR lamps across different printing brands, you know the headache. You end up fighting with custom wiring or drilling new holes in brackets just to get a lamp to fit. It’s a waste of time. That’s why we built our ceramic sockets to be a true drop-in replacement. No matter which of the five big printing brands you’re running, these just fit. Why ceramic? Because plastic melts. Simple as that. When you’re dealing with the intense heat of shortwave IR lamps, plastic or composite housings just can’t keep up. They warp. They crack. They burn out. We use high-grade alumina ceramics because they actually handle the heat. This keeps your electrical contacts tight. And that’s huge—because the second a contact gets loose, you get arcing. Once that starts, your lamp ends are fried, and you’re back to square one. The nitty-gritty on the fit We stuck to the industry benchmarks—R7s and SK15 interfaces—so they work with the most common linear halogen tubes globally. But we didn’t just copy the size. We spent time calibrating the internal spring tension. You want the lamp held securely, but you don’t want to squeeze the quartz glass so hard that it snaps. It’s a delicate balance. One thing to watch out for:check your power. A 2500W tube pulls a massive amount of current. If your wiring is too thin or your contact points have oxidized, you’ll get a voltage drop. The result? Your print bed heats up unevenly, and your quality takes a hit. Putting them to work These are built for the grit of industrial textile printing. Since the footprint is universal, you can swap them into most mainstream machines without breaking out the power tools. Just a heads-up: while the socket is universal, your power supply still needs to match the lamp. High-wattage setups create a lot of concentrated heat. Make sure your ventilation is actually doing its job, or you’ll end up overheating your entire chassis.