I've never seen the Pc windows yellow before (other than on Ripley SunSwitches) so it's odd to see this but these still work! Not sure how sensitive they are since I tested them all with a pretty powerful LED flashlight. I'd have to install them outside and see how late my street lights come on to see how sensitive they are. The silicon eye units tend to be pretty sensitive though so the yellowed window shouldn't be a huge biggie.
I have seen Sun-Tech windows yellow before. There's one on the street parallel to mine actually. I don't know if it has anything to do with Florida, and this being the "Sunshine State".
ALRs are good stuff. NEES, EUA, and NGrid never used ALRs though. EUA used gray Fisher Pierce photocells from the early days all the way until NGrid took over. When NGrid took over, they discontinued all of EUA's practices and continued to use NEES lighting stuff. NEES had always used Ripley and Fisher Pierce 120-277V PCs with gray covers until around 1991-ish when they switched to the standard blue covers (baby blue for Ripley and royal blue for FP, but they faded to a sky blue over the years) and then in 1997 they switched to 120V electronic PCs, which is when they started getting them in brown like you mentioned. Joe Maurath said the reason was likely to tell the 120V PCs apart from the gray multi-volt ones, though it really didn't matter since NEES had always used 120V PC sockets on their lights (so all those years they custom-ordered multi-volt PCs in gray they could've just bought 120V PCs which come standard gray!). Anyway, the brown PCs from the late 90s were all DTLs AFAIK but once NGrid took over around 2000 they switched to Sunrise Technologies (the would-be Sun-Tech) and then they bought out Fisher Pierce so NGrid was using FP/Sun-Tech units, still ordered in brown for whatever reason. But by 2007-ish they were using standard colored photocells. Then some 5 years later the PCs got really bad in quality.
And yet many 1960s MV cobraheads had their original lamp and PC still working when they were removed 30 years later in the 1990s. Who's REALLY got the 25+ year life?
These are what we use on our system, we use either the 7090 or 8090 VPS. I'll have to double check that. They're fairly reliable. Granted we've had some bad batches but considering we buy by the thousands that's not too bad. Is annoying though when you install one and it doesn't work right out of the box. Lol
Both the 7000 and 8000 series are pretty new. I don't like how the covers on those are shorter than normal though. Do the covers crack after being in use for several years or do they just dry out? I have some that are not that old from 2009 and the covers have tiny cracks everywhere.
Yeah, they seem to dry out. Really it seems from 2007 to present the housings are very vulnerable to UV as opposed to the older models. They just faded really bad but very little cracking. We used Fisher Pierce for about a year but the failure rate was so high that we had to go back to ALR.
That may be when they started being made in China. Previously they were made in Trinidad. And before that, USA. I have some Trinidad ones from 2005 I think, and the covers on those just become chalky, no noticeable cracking. The sides are shiny though, probably from handling.
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I just got some used black ALR photocontrols too! I got mine from somebody I met thru eBay. They were free. Although I paid for the shipping.