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400W HPS M-400 Lighting the Yard
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...with a 400W MV lamp! I yanked out the ignitor and swapped the 400W HPS lamp for a 90s Philips 400W /DX MV lamp, which has light hours on it. The lamp came from Joe. I forget when it was installed but it was like 1990-1992 and it was removed during the 1994 HPS onslaught IIRC.
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I've never lit anything HID over 100w in my yard before, I think if I installed my 400w HPS OVF in my backyard or even my Crimefighter, all my neighbours would kill me.
Yeah those tubular MV lamps are cool. I have some from Webster. I can use them in my GE PF-400s. GE did make PF-400s in 400W MV, so the ED37 lamps should fit but I had trouble getting one in, since mine are 400W HPS so the socket is probably set differently for the ET18 lamps. My tubular lamps are buried somewhere in one of those big white boxes of lamps in my shed (I have five of them, each with like 30-50 assorted lamps; the ~50 lamp ones are all BT25s and ED23.5s while the lesser quantities are for larger ED28/BT28 and ED37/BT37 lamps).
Oh yeah I had my crimefighter installed with a 200W mogul base incandescent just to see what it was like and that thing spread the light ALL over the neighborhood lol. From a 200W incandescent lamp! That's like maybe 3000 lumens and the place was lit up like daytime. Imagine a 250W CMH lamp in our crimefighters? You could light up a massive field with that lol. The crimefighter buckets are weird though since they don't properly align, the light is focused in a X shape with two prongs of the X longer than the other two, which creates a random pattern instead of a uniform pool of light. I suppose with a /DX lamp the pattern would be (at least slightly) diffused and less apparent.
I'd imagine you'd probably have to use a different set of mounting holes for the socket and switch out or rotate the lamp support to fit a ED-37 lamp. I believe on the Widelite F series, you had to flip the lamp support to switch from BT/ET to ED lamps.
Interesting about the lighting pattern, I light a /DX lamp in mine so I didn't really notice notice the pattern, I also never mounted it too and I gues you can't really see it upside down lol. Mine has a MH ballast so I could always use a MH lamp for the extra brightness lol.
Speaking of Crimefighters, I spotted another one in the wild today. It seems that they are quite common in Canada. Perhaps CGE offered them at one point in the 60s as a alternative to NEMA heads.
Yeah I'll have to take a closer look at the PF-400s someday.