I asked my mother in law (the property owner) when the old Hg lamps were last replaced, and I was told that they were originals from time of installation. She thinks they were put in around 1978 or so. The one on the garage lasted until about a month ago, as it was only run for about 8hrs/day during the colder months. The one on the pole was run all year around in a shady area, so it would be lit more, an it went out a few years ago.
If we assume 40lm/W and 70% loss we can guestimate the old Hg bulb to be at ~2100lm. The 55W LPS lamp is rated at >7800lm, so there is no wonder about the stark difference in brightness. In fact, at 40lm/W a 7800lm 55W LPS is still brighter than a 175W Hg lamp!
I've tried running mine off a cheap 150W inverter and it seems to run just fine, it could be nice for camping given the tiny power draw and huge light output. Would run for hours on a small-ish SLA.
Shame the 180 isn't working. You've got TC's, try exciting it with one and see what happens. It could be a fill-gas issue, over or under pressure, and the like.
They have relativey high light output, but it's spread over a large area. Not only that, but a higher power lamp is also in a much larger tube. The surface intensity isn't too much higher than a CFL. The surface intensity is what gives it "glare" and makes it painful to look at, not the total light output. Metal halide, HPS, or even LEDs are a lot more painful to look at than LPS.
The quick and dirty LPS lamp installation at the garage impressed my mother in law (property owner) so much that she commissioned me to do a professional installation!
She also requested I fully re-wire the garage and then also replace the outdoor outlet on the house. The empty box with line coiled on it will be a new outlet that the lamp plugs in to. Once I get another free day I'll run the rest of the line work.
I posted a bit earlier asking if anyone was into Sodium lamps and got lead to this thread. I have read every page and thoroughly enjoyed what I saw, and I knew I'd eventually get myself my very own LPS lamp.
Over here in the UK these are still fairly common, especially on quiet side streets, villages in the country side or older areas of town. When I was a fair bit younger I remember LPS lamps being everywhere, including the huge ones on motorways and major roads. Increasingly though they are being replaced by HPS and LEDs, mainly on a one to one basis, i.e. if an LPS lamp dies the council will usually just replace it with a HPS or LED. New builds or renovated areas will never use LPS anymore, instead opting for HPS or LED. In another 10-20 years LPS will probably be a rarity in all but the most run down areas or very rural areas, where there are sometimes a small cluster of street lights and then nothing for miles either side.
It seems that the declining usage of LPS lamps means that a lot of them are going up for sale - one can almost always find a few on ebay. I recently won an ebay auction for a Philips MI26 LPS SOX-E 26W street light. All things considered it's in near damn mint condition and only needed a few dead spiders removing and wiring to a plug. The gear and bulb works perfectly, no noticeable flickering (although it did a flicker a tiny bit the first day I got it) and compared to some that I remember as a child, this one is pretty quiet!
The thing that really surprised me is that no matter what, until you see one in the flesh it's almost impossible to comprehend the scale of these things. The bulb alone dwarfs many everyday objects and when I took delivery of the package I couldn't believe the size and weight. In terms of street lights the MI26 is really small, but in terms of everyday objects its rather cumbersome.
It's huge - and heavy! I put some electrical tape over the daylight sensor (easier to do this than to remove it from the circuit). A slightly funny thing about this is you can clearly see scratching on the top from where seagulls and other birds have sat on the post. Oh how they love to do that (and shit all over them...)
Let's take a look at the innards:
The gear is in reasonable nick and all appears to work fine. The bulb starts quickly and works as it should. And it looks like it's all made in the EU - the bulb is even UK made.
Cold start is the lovely pink colour that I remember fondly as a child. The village I grew up in as a child had mostly HPS lamps but for some reason I always preferred the LPS lamps and always remember how they started up:
It turns yellow reasonably quickly, probably within 5 minutes, and then in the next 5-10 minutes reaches full brightness:
I pondered for a few days on where to put it. Even at 26W this thing is bloody bright. Just having it sitting somewhere in the room that I could regularly see it would annoy me, being so bright it'd just be a blight in my vision.
It's like having your own personal sun!!
I initially tried it on the floor behind the furniture but that didn't spread the light as I liked it, and created bright spots that made me uneasy. So I tried it in a sort of cubby-hole at the corner of the room near the ceiling...
Start up
Warm up...
Full chat!
And this is the final result once the sun has gone down... and come up, in my living room
It's pretty cool having one of these around - using the ceiling as a reflector it's probably as bright (just very orange) as an adequately lit room would normally be. I struggle to brighten rooms up as I find most sources of light give me eye strain, so far this lamp is not. It's strange seeing in only one colour but I probably won't have it constantly on. It also emits a slight buzz which might bug me if I'm trying to chill, but overall it's a cool feature. I even did a short video:
I remember as a kid, swinging on the swingset in the school playground after school, waiting for the LPS lamps on the side of the school building to turn on. It was fascinating seeing how they warm up, seeing the colors move along the tube. Ours were in those rolled steel enclosure/reflector with clear glass plate in front.
It's becoming a rare sight nowadays to see a whole bunch of them in one place. I drove home today from work and actually made a point to spot LPS lamps. I spotted... two. And I'm sure there were more on that route a few years ago. Saying that, we went driving out in the country last weekend and there were still whole neighbourhoods and small hamlets that were totally LPS.
I wouldn't mind finding a major road or motorway that still uses the 180W lamps and waiting until dusk when they all power on at once. Now THAT would be a sight to behold. thankfully there are a few hardcore lamp collectors on the net who document these things, a bit like trainspotting but... lamp.. spotting.
These things are a real miracle of glasswork. The efficiency is so high that it actually prevents the bulb
from warming up enough to work properly. They have to be surrounded by an outer vacuum envelope in
order to eliminate conduction and convection. Otherwise it will get robbed what little heat is produced.
That is something you will learn about if you ever take a refrigerator compressor and run it as a vacuum
pump. The heat is only able to escape as radiation (the third type) and it will silently burn itself out. Then
it will get burning hot once the air is let back in.
second one in my collection, this one's 135W and dates from the 70s, the lantern is called a Hyperion 135.
I picked it up in person from the guy selling it and paid cash, while we were on a road trip to see the 180W motorway SOX still in use in some parts of England.
More pictures:
^The leak transformer is as big as a brick and heavy as several. It's larger than the entire gear (right) for my MI 26, which I now moved to the bedroom. The lantern is remote gear so actually very compact. when up on a tall pole these, and particularly the 180W version look very slender giving them an appearance of being even longer. As you can see it makes a nice ornament but the light is too dazzling indoors to be useful!
Hopefully getting a mercury lamp next from a fellow collector.
video if anyone's interested:
and of my motorway trip too:
As you can see my interest has blossomed and I have become a full on street light nerd!
Beautiful lamp! My, that roadway is gorgeous, haha. I miss having a LPS lamp in my room, I moved mine outside as a security light last year. I'm thinking about tracking down a low wattage LPS bulb and rigging a CFL ballast to run it.
If I put mine outside I could light half the street :eg: it would truly put the HPS to shame. We rarely have interesting street lighting anymore, I would love an old mercury cobra head from the US like a Westinghouse OV 25.
"Electric Pickle" lol.
