Here ya go Joe_347V, here's the interior of the Fisher Pierce relay so the the built in time delay. Notice it's only the eye that's really any different.
Nice! I've heard of those electromagnetic relay PCs that had a time delay but never knew how it worked. Were these any less reliable than the standard instant response ones because of the circuit board?
These things are tanks, by far some of the best I've ever seen. Even Ripley. . in all seriousness though they are great and I've yet to come across a bad one. I think the relay last a lot longer as it's an instant voltage and don't have that hum like the instant response ones like as the light gets brighter they hum louder until they finally switch. Less ware on the relay.
The old FPs like these were nice but the new Sun-Tech ones are pretty bad. The older Ripleys from before 2000 seem to not be the best made PCs but the new SouthConn ones with the "shaved" corners on top are the best I've seen for current PCs. DTLs seem nice too despite being made in China.
Yeah I've always wondered if that humming at "sunrise" hurt the PC over time. I've seem some older EM relay PCs that go nuts when they see daylight (the contacts open-close-open-close-open-close really fast and the light flashes like a strobe and the PC makes a godawful noise lol. I'd imagine that would fry the lamp in an HID fixture pretty quickly.
Thermal PCs seem like they'd last the longest since there's really nothing to fail but they always seemed inferior to me (and all the ones made nowadays are indeed crapola from China. None of the big guys make their own thermal PCs, or even electromagnetic ones for that matter AFAIK) and I always disliked the long delay. Holds you up when testing the PC and if you flip the light switch on for the light before you leave home, expecting to return after dark, so you want the light to be on when it gets dark, the light stays on for a minute and the lamp essentially warms up and then shuts off. It wastes the lamps life by starting it up.
HIDs don't like frequent switching. The DOT here had decided to shut some of the freeway lights off between 12AM and 5AM Sunday through Thursday and 2AM and 5AM on Fridays and Saturdays to save energy. I've noticed the lamps failing slightly quicker on those selected systems since they're now being switched on twice as often as before. The reduced burn times probably help the lamp life from being shortened even more but sometimes dayburners can last for several years running 24/7 since they're not switched on/off at all (MH would be the exception though lol). Of course, I can't rule out the possibility that RIDOT simply started using crappier lamps lol.
But the freeway lights are being mass-replaced with LeoTek LEDs with smart-PCs made by Cimcon and controlled by a network managed by Silver Spring. They started this mass-conversion back around April of this year (somewhere around there; it was sometime in Spring of 2016 though) and they plan to have all their freeway lights LED by the end of this year, except for existing lighting infrastructure that is going to be replaced due to reconstruction projects. I assume those lights will remain HPS since they'd be coming down. Anyway, they've done tremendous progress. Over half the state's freeways are LED now. Not sure if they'll meet their deadline but they won't be far off.
Interestingly, a local RIDOT project involving brand new light poles is using HPS lights instead of LEDs. So as they're mass-installing LEDs onto existing poles, the new poles here are still going up as HPS lol. I think the reason for this is that the project was planned and funded before the start of the LED retrofit, so the plans specified FCO HPS lights on a group relay, which was RIDOT's standard. Now their new practice is to bypass the group switching and have the lights individually controlled via the Silver Spring network, which has proven to be a disaster, at least IMO. Some lights are dayburners, some are out totally, and all malfunctions aside, it's a way bigger maintenance headache to maintain all those photocells! Before they maybe had 6 or 7 dozen relay cabinets in the state to maintain. And they had done lots of work retrofitted their old 1960s PC-controlled systems with relay cabinets in order to do the part-night control. Now they're bypassing the relay cabinets (which now only serve as a stand for the kWh meter and as a service disconnect) and taking a step backward IMO.
Thanks for the pic, yeah it seems like the electronic circuit triggers the relay instead of being directly triggered by the cell. They must be more rare than the instant response ones. I've yet to come across one.
They weren't used as widely on our system as the instant response but I still find them from time to time. We started getting them in 98 then around sometime in 1999 we went to ALR so there was only about a year we had them. I usually hang onto them as they're usually enclosed in post tops so they still look new.
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Yeah I've always wondered if that humming at "sunrise" hurt the PC over time. I've seem some older EM relay PCs that go nuts when they see daylight (the contacts open-close-open-close-open-close really fast and the light flashes like a strobe and the PC makes a godawful noise lol. I'd imagine that would fry the lamp in an HID fixture pretty quickly.
Thermal PCs seem like they'd last the longest since there's really nothing to fail but they always seemed inferior to me (and all the ones made nowadays are indeed crapola from China. None of the big guys make their own thermal PCs, or even electromagnetic ones for that matter AFAIK) and I always disliked the long delay. Holds you up when testing the PC and if you flip the light switch on for the light before you leave home, expecting to return after dark, so you want the light to be on when it gets dark, the light stays on for a minute and the lamp essentially warms up and then shuts off. It wastes the lamps life by starting it up.
HIDs don't like frequent switching. The DOT here had decided to shut some of the freeway lights off between 12AM and 5AM Sunday through Thursday and 2AM and 5AM on Fridays and Saturdays to save energy. I've noticed the lamps failing slightly quicker on those selected systems since they're now being switched on twice as often as before. The reduced burn times probably help the lamp life from being shortened even more but sometimes dayburners can last for several years running 24/7 since they're not switched on/off at all (MH would be the exception though lol). Of course, I can't rule out the possibility that RIDOT simply started using crappier lamps lol.
But the freeway lights are being mass-replaced with LeoTek LEDs with smart-PCs made by Cimcon and controlled by a network managed by Silver Spring. They started this mass-conversion back around April of this year (somewhere around there; it was sometime in Spring of 2016 though) and they plan to have all their freeway lights LED by the end of this year, except for existing lighting infrastructure that is going to be replaced due to reconstruction projects. I assume those lights will remain HPS since they'd be coming down. Anyway, they've done tremendous progress. Over half the state's freeways are LED now. Not sure if they'll meet their deadline but they won't be far off.
Interestingly, a local RIDOT project involving brand new light poles is using HPS lights instead of LEDs. So as they're mass-installing LEDs onto existing poles, the new poles here are still going up as HPS lol. I think the reason for this is that the project was planned and funded before the start of the LED retrofit, so the plans specified FCO HPS lights on a group relay, which was RIDOT's standard. Now their new practice is to bypass the group switching and have the lights individually controlled via the Silver Spring network, which has proven to be a disaster, at least IMO. Some lights are dayburners, some are out totally, and all malfunctions aside, it's a way bigger maintenance headache to maintain all those photocells! Before they maybe had 6 or 7 dozen relay cabinets in the state to maintain. And they had done lots of work retrofitted their old 1960s PC-controlled systems with relay cabinets in order to do the part-night control. Now they're bypassing the relay cabinets (which now only serve as a stand for the kWh meter and as a service disconnect) and taking a step backward IMO.