New lamps and fixtures, as well as old ones to be junked. I asked for some and they wont give me any off the truck, saying a liability issue. He said as ballasts age they wear out the bulbs sooner, and it is cheaper to replace the entire fixture than make repeated visits to the same pole/light due to failed bulbs.
Cool pic By the way the liability issue is common among all major utilities across the USA. It is often tricky to be able to get lights. All the lights here are HPS but there are sometimes interesting fixtures such as Tudors.
I got lucky to get a junked light (AE 113) From an Xcel Utility guy, who had lots of cobraheads in the truck like this. I got reaaaaly lucky to get one of the junkers. There were lots of new fixtures, more new fixtures then old ones. The only old cobrahead was the 113 I got anyway.
I've had those "liability issues" many times before. I even offered to sign a waiver but they wouldn't go for that. and as for older fixture killing the lamps sooner, well I would seriously disagree.
Lamps fail pretty quickly sometimes because of their poor quality, and lamps fail prematurely when there's numerous power interruptions making the light go on and off alot which can wear a lamp out real quick.
A few years ago, a suburb was going to soon replace all their Form 109's. Don Roberts, a good friend of mine suggested we ask the Lord to make sure I was able to obtain one. (An unusual request, but I thought, why not? ). Sure enough, by a narrow window of opportunity, I was able to bring one home. It happened to be the only one in a pile of lights that wasn't damaged! An "Act of God" for sure!
Here most streetlights are serviced/replaced at night so you have to have some luck in finding one around here. there are soem I have a close eye on though and i'll try to get if an LED takeover happens here.
I don't see many power company crews out in my area very often repairing or replacing streetlights in person, I saw Duquesne Light replacing a Crouse-Hinds L-150 in Blawnox over a month ago.
Here they do them all during the day, the only time they would ever work at night is in the event of a pole knockdown or some other sort of urgent thing like that.
I happened to catch them turning the M-250R2 in front of my house back on around 8PM a couple of years ago (it was "red capped" to save the city money, but it was disliked by many residents, so the lights were turned back on) and that's how I scored my open cap and a new Sun-tech PC.
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By the way the liability issue is common among all major utilities across the USA. It is often tricky to be able to get lights. All the lights here are HPS but there are sometimes interesting fixtures such as Tudors.
and as for older fixture killing the lamps sooner, well I would seriously disagree.