Nice find! HD or Lowe's should have the proper lamp if you can't wait to light it up but I think eBay will have them for cheaper.

Wow that's crazy that a manufacturer would wire the PC sockets up wrong! Yeah I heard their HE FCO optics are very good. The newer Cooper refractors used on the OVZ have excellent lamp distribution. The best I've ever seen with HPS. No streaks or dark/bright spots. Very evenly lit area.

Yeah I have a 1990 Cooper OVC, 50W HPS. Nice fixture. I like it a lot. The casting seems very thin to me but a nice looking fixture. It was only in service a little over 5 years.

I have a few NOS 150/D lamps, I have one installed in my M250A2 in my room that I converted to FCO a while back. The coated lamps are much better IMO for FCO as there is no glare compared to a clear lamp. With GE FCO there is a bright streak in the middle of the pattern. I want to take one of those /D lamps and put it in service near my house to see the real difference compared to a clear lamp.

Yeah the coated lamps are nice for FCO. I have a coated 50W HPS lamp and a coated 150W HPS lamp. I wish I had one in 70W though for my M-250R2, though now I have it converted to drop lens, since the reflectors can be swapped simply by removing the screw and swapping the slip-on connectors. My M-250R2 is from 1985 (first year they were made) so it's got a metallic NEMA tag and the street side of the refractor is recessed into the door.

What year is your M-250A2? I have an M-250A2 FCO from 1987. It was originally 100/175W MV (they used a lot of those in the 80s here) and it was removed in the early 90s and rebuilt as a 50W HPS unit. I have a spare blank ballast door that I installed a 250W Advance MH/MV ballast on so I can make my M-250A2 FCO 50W HPS or 250W MH or 250W MV. Right now it's installed in my backyard with the 250W door and a /DX Sylvania merc from 2010. Not used regularly, just for parties. If I had it in nightly use I'd use the 50W door and then just swap the door and lamp when we had parties for brighter white light and then revert back to the 50W HPS so the meter isn't racing all night. Since it's FCO it wouldn't bother the neighbors, though if I were to use a MH lamp I'd probably swap the FCO glass for a drop glass since I don't think an FCO glass would contain a lamp explosion. The lamp is within an inch or less of the glass so the impact would probably be the equivalent of smacking the glass with a rubber mallet.

Mine are NOS from 1996, got a good deal on them on ebay several years back. You should get a ge sag lense to use in place of the flat glass, that would definitely contain a lamp explosion and still maintain the FCO optics. I'm actually looking a getting a 50 hps door to have and mess with. 150 is a little bright for the room. Lol

Yep I got this one off eBay, (probably was the same seller as yours Lil'Cinnamon - picture didn't have a NEMA tag)... one day I just typed "GE M250" into the search, saw this & put it in my watchlist, then about a week later the seller put it on sale so I bought one

I had no idea Lowe's/Home Depot even sold PC's, figured I'd have to find one on eBay .. Lil'Cinnamon I might just take you up on that offer.

I assumed a MH or MV lamp would not work, but wanted to douple check before getting a HPS one.
I think I'll check the local ReStore first, I know I've seen HPS lamps there in the past...
(Also whats a 'CosmoWhite' lamp? I've seen it mentioned on the ATL site & it supposedly works on HPS ballasts (is it just a less-orange HPS?))

Datecode is 04-07 .. so 4th week of 2007?

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Also interesting reading through all the replies

Yup, 04-07 should be the 4th week of 2007. If no luck at the restore you're talking about, I've seen several on ebay for less than $8. That's for the good ones and not the crap Alto ones out there. I'm actually watching that seller and another one that has some 70w M250A2's for $80. I'm thinking about grabbing one of those or a 50w dior for the A2 I have mounted now. So many choices. Lol

Ick! I hate sag lenses lol. I'd like to find a 175W MH/MV door and maybe a 100 or 150W HPS ballast door since I have those wattage lamps. Yeah 50W is a nice brightness. A little dim for task lighting but nice if you're just relaxing. 70W HPS or 100W MV is perfect for my room. Sometimes I use a browned out refractor in the light I mount in my room since it helps diffuse the light too.

Yep 4th week of 2007.

I believe a CosmoWhite lamp is a CMH lamp that's designed for HPS ballasts. Unfortunately I think it's for European ballasts so it won't run on a 55v HPS ballast. You could however try running them on the same wattage PSMH ballast as I think our PSMH ballasts and European HPS ballasts have similar arc voltages.

As for the less yellow HPS lamps, I think Eye makes them but I believe they're not cheap so it might be cheaper to just reballast to MV or MH to get white light.

You could always look for a 100/150 HPS ballast. Simple tab switch and change lamp, beats having separate doors. I eventually want to find a merc door for mine. Heck I'd really like to find a 175w MH door and keep it FCO and just find a open rated MH lamp incase of rupture.

Yeah a 100/150W HPS fixture would be cool. They seem less common than single wattage. I have three 175W MH lamps and three 175W MV fixtures, but they won't light the MH lamps, just MV. They're unprotected though.


Yeah the MH retrofit lamps for use on HPS are only made for the 100V lamps here (400W and less commonly, 250W)

If I remember, there is a 100/150 AE115 on ebay now. Not sure the price but it's unfinished so it does look kinda cool. Can't remember if it has HE optics or not. The ballasts are less common. The only place I've seen them is at work. Lol I did recently get a 250/400 hps ballast so I eventually plan to build a box for testing 100/150/250/400w lamps and really be able to cut down on weight.

I think I know the light you're talking about. Yeah eBay is usually too expensive when shipping is factored in. I won't spend more than 100 bucks on a street light lol. I think the 115 looks weird in FCO. Looks better in drop lens IMO. A 100/150/250/400W HPS ballast box would be really cool with just two ballasts. Were 100/175W MV ballasts ever used in your system? They were heavily used in the 80s here since most of the MVs here were 100, 175, and 400W. No 250W or 700W MVs here, but there were 1000W MVs.

No luck finding a PC or HPS lamp at the local ReStore (didn't have time for checking Lowes & Home Depot).. I'll probably just eBay the lamp since they can be had fairly cheap on there
May try & take Lil'Cinnamon up on his offer for a PC

The thought of converting to MH did cross my mind (then I could get a green lamp for it, which would look cool) ... but I also like the idea of keeping it all original (if it was some used thing picked up cheap at a garage sale, then I might be likely to convert/modify )

There was a time when all the streetlights around here were MV... I remember as a kid I always liked the nice blue-ish streetlights, then when they came through and converted to HPS, I didn't like the orange color & thought they were ugly.
Back then the thought that I might own such a thing never even crossed my mind.

We have some 100/175 mv ov15's but the line voltage has to be changed to change the wattage. We do have a few 250/400w mv M400A2's though. I really wish we would go with 250/400 HPS replacement doors for the GE's. I carry 4 400 & 2 250 A2 doors and 1 250 & 400 A3 doors on my truck. Would be much easier to just swap the tab on the cap then I wouldn't have to worry about running out of doors. Not that it happens often but still.

Xmaslightguy, you are better off with eBay for a lamp. You'll find one dirt cheap and most likely free shipping. You'll easily spend 25+ at Lowe's or home Depot. I'm the same way about keeping things original. Lol

That's interesting that the line voltage had to be changed to change the lamp wattage. The GEs had two male plugs coming off the ballast (a 100W and a 175W) and one female plug coming from line volts. To change the wattage, just disconnect the plug from it's existing wattage and plug it into the other. For Thomas & Betts, there were three spades on the reactor ballast instead of two. There was a 100W spade, a 175W spade, and then the "other" spade to complete the 240V circuit. The both worked the same way but with T&B you just moved one hot wire whereas with GE both the supply and load hot wires were attached to the plug (plug is polarized) GE's method was basically a more complicated looking version of the same thing. T&B's method worked great until the little paper labels came off the ballast windings saying 100W 175W and LAMP. Of course, once the fixture is installed it generally doesn't have the wattage changed again and if it did, there would probably be an old lamp you you'd know the old wattage and just switch it to the other.

Yeah, next time I work on an ov15 I'll have to dbl check but I'm pretty sure that's how I remember it. I think it was on the 100w we use.

Once in a while we get a call to either increase or decrease the wattage so having the 100/150 ballast is nice. That's usually done on new installations though.

Ah yeah sometimes they up the wattage but one city near me lowered it. They shut off (open capped) some of the 250W HPS lights on the main road and replaced all the ones that weren't shut off with 100W HPS, so their main roads are REALLY dark now. Sometimes they'll replace a 100W MV with 100W HPS to keep the kWh usage the same I guess. 50W HPS is too dim IMO so I'm glad to see 100W HPS go up instead. Only happens sometimes though. Here they install 50 (or 70 in part of the state since the former utility co there used 70W HPS instead of 50), 100, 250, and 400W HPS. 150W HPS lights were used very rarely in the mid-late 80s but they're not maintained since there's so few of them so when their lamps die, a 100W HPS goes up in its place.

I've got a lamp for this now
For testing I'll just have to put a jumper across the PC socket (gonna have to look closely at that to see how its wired...)