You get what you pay for. I bought this specifically for a day-long photography project for a non-profit organization. The first onion is fried for 1-2 hours. Then the second onion is fried. And the third. The fires get very hot. We replaced them with high wattage bulbs and there were no more problems after that. The actual hardware isn't high quality, but I wasn't expecting that. Everything worked after the lightbulb problem.