It's probably one of the plainer designs but I always had a liking to the GE brick style lenses. You keeping the plastic Eagle lenses or planning to find replacements?
The one I am keeping has the most original lenses, the other has enough to make one complete set. I am leaving mine as is including the lens arrangement
As of now I am going to use the traffic grade bulbs. Most of my other incandescent signals are 40 watt ceiling fan type. In terms of brightness I don't see much of a difference between 40watt fan bulbs or 69 watt traffic bulbs.
Yeah the extra wattage is probably just for the longer life. To get the longer life, the filament is underdriven, which lowers its efficiency considerably, so they have to use a higher wattage to maintain the same light output. 100W 130V incandscents use 88W on 120V and only give around the same lumens as a 60-75W incandescent. But they will last FOREEEEEVER on 120V.
Yeah, it's also why traffic bulbs usually have a somewhat yellower appearance compared to standard incnadescent bulbs.
I used to use 40w and 60w clear appliance bulbs in my incandescent signals (and also 29w clear halogen bulbs for a bit) but I recently changed the bulbs in my frequently switched on signals to 40-60w equivalent clear LED filament bulbs. Looks almost indistinguishable from incandescent but with a fraction of the power draw and heat emitted. Some even have a incandescent style fadeout although that depends on the driver design.
When I had used my signal indoors I actually used 15W IF rough service bulbs. The signal was very dim but indoors it was still plenty of light. 40 or 60W lamps were just too bright. And CFLs wouldn't work well since they take a little bit to warm up. An A-shape LED might work with the incandescent socket though.
Gotta be careful when using LED bulbs bought from Home Depot, etc. Alone they don't pull enough load for the traffic signal conflict monitors to see the circuit. It will trip to flash when seeing what it thinks is no load. They will work find if an actual traffic LED module or a 25w or higher incandescent bulb are on the same circuit
Why do the actual LED modules work but not regular bulbs?
Is the entire intersection supposed to flash when a lamp burns out? That doesn't happen around here. RIDOT was a nightmare at maintaining the signals here before they went LED state-wide. There would be incandescent lamps burned out all over the place and they would get fixed until both colors in that direction were out. With the new LED modules, they will eventually replace them individually as they burn out, but sometimes it takes up to a year for them to get around to fixing it. Either they don't notice it or they don't take high priority in fixing them lol. They also haven't spot replaced missing visors in ages. It's mostly an issue with the newer Eagle Bubbleback style aluminum signals they use here(probably starting after Siemens sold the line to whoever runs it now). The visors blow off in windstorms and never get replaced. In the past they would only replace visors when spot relamping an incandescent signal but now they're LEDs so it'll be awhile.
RIDOT isn't the best with maintaining street lights either so in a way I'm glad to see the LED street lights going up since it hopefully means better freeway lighting. But most of their issues are with bad wiring between poles, not bad individual fixtures, so the LEDs do little to fix that problem. It's interesting to see LEDs installed on poles with HPS lights that haven't worked in over a decade and see the LEDs don't work from day one either, because they pay no attention to the wiring faults.
Even in the past they gave little attention to bad wiring. When they did their scheduled relamp for a freeway (usually once every 5 years or so; each freeway is done at a different time to offset the cost I suppose) they would relamp all the fixtures and the ones that didn't light with a new lamp were replaced with a new HPS fixture. That's their protocol. New lamp, New PC, still don't work: replace it! So, for awhile every 5 or so years they were replacing fixtures that were installed during the last scheduled maintenance run and were never used a day in their life because there's no power to the pole. Gotta be the stupidest thing I've ever witnessed. Biggest waste of money too. With the cost of the new fixtures they could pay a utility electrician to troubleshoot the wiring faults. Many of the systems are from the late 50s to early 60s so the wiring is probably beyond its life and should be replaced but there's some newer systems that don't quite work right either.
Some of the freeway lighting is owned and maintained by the utility company here (National Grid) and they're no better than RIDOT either (worse actually; they rarely even relamp the fixtures because they KNOW there's wiring faults, so they just make no effort to fix them at all until someone wrecks their car and the state gets on their butts about it being a safety hazard having no working lighting. Oh the irony.
Actual LED modules are built for traffic signal operation and include components to increase the load. Your standard LED bulb from Home Depot does not need this feature. A signal will go into flash if all loads on a channel go bad. Its common for certain movements, like left turns with only one signal to have a secondary load in the cabinet so if a bulb goes in the field the conflict monitor doesnt think the whole channel is bad. If a single bulb goes out, typically things work normally as the remaining signals still pull enough load to that particular output channel
How does the LED module accomplish this? Are LED traffic signal modules LPF to increase the total current draw? I'm just using a Lights-To-Go sequencer to control my signal so I can feel free to use standard LEDs, though they won't perform well optically. I'd probably just get a bright whitish spot on the center of the lenses and the rest wouldn't be very bright. Hi-output white LEDs are very glary and have an insane surface brightness. Makes them appear way brighter than incandescent in your home when you look at the bulb, but when you look at the room, the room is about the same brightness as with the incandescent, if not a little dimmer. Same with linear fluorescent lighting. Way softer light that's easy on the eyes. With LEDs everyone is going to need glasses since the intensely focused light from LEDs is going to fry everyone's eyes. I already have glasses though so the most they can do to me is just worsen my eyesight lol.
Hmm, I never actually measured the current draw and PF on my traffic light LED modules. I wonder how different they are compared to regular household LEDs. I've also heard that when LED signals were first introduced, they had the same issue with older model conflict monitors.
Anyway, I use sequencers or homemade controllers for all my signals so household LEDs aren't a problem for me. Standard LEDs look odd in a signal but 2700K clear LED filaments work really well as a incnadescent replacement. They also make 2200K LED filament bulbs too which look more like signal incandescent bulbs.
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I used to use 40w and 60w clear appliance bulbs in my incandescent signals (and also 29w clear halogen bulbs for a bit) but I recently changed the bulbs in my frequently switched on signals to 40-60w equivalent clear LED filament bulbs. Looks almost indistinguishable from incandescent but with a fraction of the power draw and heat emitted. Some even have a incandescent style fadeout although that depends on the driver design.
Is the entire intersection supposed to flash when a lamp burns out? That doesn't happen around here. RIDOT was a nightmare at maintaining the signals here before they went LED state-wide. There would be incandescent lamps burned out all over the place and they would get fixed until both colors in that direction were out. With the new LED modules, they will eventually replace them individually as they burn out, but sometimes it takes up to a year for them to get around to fixing it. Either they don't notice it or they don't take high priority in fixing them lol. They also haven't spot replaced missing visors in ages. It's mostly an issue with the newer Eagle Bubbleback style aluminum signals they use here(probably starting after Siemens sold the line to whoever runs it now). The visors blow off in windstorms and never get replaced. In the past they would only replace visors when spot relamping an incandescent signal but now they're LEDs so it'll be awhile.
RIDOT isn't the best with maintaining street lights either so in a way I'm glad to see the LED street lights going up since it hopefully means better freeway lighting. But most of their issues are with bad wiring between poles, not bad individual fixtures, so the LEDs do little to fix that problem. It's interesting to see LEDs installed on poles with HPS lights that haven't worked in over a decade and see the LEDs don't work from day one either, because they pay no attention to the wiring faults.
Even in the past they gave little attention to bad wiring. When they did their scheduled relamp for a freeway (usually once every 5 years or so; each freeway is done at a different time to offset the cost I suppose) they would relamp all the fixtures and the ones that didn't light with a new lamp were replaced with a new HPS fixture. That's their protocol. New lamp, New PC, still don't work: replace it! So, for awhile every 5 or so years they were replacing fixtures that were installed during the last scheduled maintenance run and were never used a day in their life because there's no power to the pole. Gotta be the stupidest thing I've ever witnessed. Biggest waste of money too. With the cost of the new fixtures they could pay a utility electrician to troubleshoot the wiring faults. Many of the systems are from the late 50s to early 60s so the wiring is probably beyond its life and should be replaced but there's some newer systems that don't quite work right either.
Some of the freeway lighting is owned and maintained by the utility company here (National Grid) and they're no better than RIDOT either (worse actually; they rarely even relamp the fixtures because they KNOW there's wiring faults, so they just make no effort to fix them at all until someone wrecks their car and the state gets on their butts about it being a safety hazard having no working lighting. Oh the irony.
Anyway, I use sequencers or homemade controllers for all my signals so household LEDs aren't a problem for me. Standard LEDs look odd in a signal but 2700K clear LED filaments work really well as a incnadescent replacement. They also make 2200K LED filament bulbs too which look more like signal incandescent bulbs.