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My 1990 AE Series 113 50W HPS After Cleaning
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After an intense cleaning this light is looking great again! The top housing has lots of mold-stuff on it from being installed within a tree. Some bleach-soaked paper towels and a lot of scrubbing took all that crap right off. The inside was disgusting. Lots of empty wasp nests, dirt, dust, spider webs, spider nests, dead spiders, live spiders, and dead wasps. The gasket was also filthy from a birds nest that was in the original refractor.
The fixture was relamped in 2006 and got a replacement GE plastic lens, replacing the broken original lens. In 2010, the light was "red capped" and toward the end of 2010 it was re-energized with a 2010 blue Sun-Tech photocell. Then the light worked fine until like 2014-ish and suddenly stopped. I had assumed the ignitor fried. But it was just the lamp thankfully! With Cranston's LED changeout, this particular street hasn't been changed out yet. During a pole renewal, NGrid, who no longer owns the light, has a practice of taping the light and arm to the base of the new pole. Since the light would probably get taken by a junkman or would otherwise be replaced with an LED, I rescued it on my way home from work last night.
It's pretty cool to actually have a light I've seen everyday since I was about five. I will be seeking out an acrylic American Electric refractor for this though to bring it back to its original state. The square GE lens looks pretty weird on this lol.
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This light is now installed in my room and running as I write this.
A: Replace it with a GE Evolve POS
B: Don't do anything about it and just leave it to die on the pole
I am hoping that they might do the same thing if they do replace it (leave the old light on the ground for a few days) so that I could sneakily smuggle it away, but this is a very populated area and doing so could be risky.
Our electric company NGrid is still installing HPS as the standard. They do offer LEDs but I haven't seen any place use them. Any city/town that has gone LED has done so by purchasing ownership of the street lights from National Grid. I'm curious to see what brand fixtures NGrid decides to use. I assume they'd be GE or Cooper though since NGrid uses a lot of GE and Eaton (Cooper) products.
Thankfully there haven't been any major protests in the southern New England area. The ones that have happened were peaceful. There was more protesting in RI with the "Black Lives Matter" protests. People just want a reason to be hellraisers and cause mischief. Any excuse you give scummy people they'll go around and torch buildings, break windows, assault people, you name it. Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large crowds!
Yeah I kinda also miss seeing the HPS lights too as well as the character of the older fixtures in my neighbourhood since we had a lot of classic cobras up until the changeout in 2014-2015 but I do like the whiter light at night.
I do have some of the classic cobras in my collection so it's only a matter of firing one up if I miss the old cobras.
Yeah I miss the cobraheads in my area. I can't WAIT to get my own place where I can install some poles on the property and get to stand out in my backyard when I have the evening off and gawk up at them and watch them come on one-by-one.
Would be nice to have at least one cobra installed in my yard though. My backyard is fairly deep but it's quite narrow, I think around 35' x 90' but I haven't actually measured my yard.
All of these dimensions are based on Google Maps using their 1" = 20ft scale. (...) You can see my neighbors' trailer to the top of the screen and the location of the deck and original shed (though my street lights didn't show up in the resolution). The lights are about 65ft apart according to Google Maps. You can see the picture is a bit dated too since my shed isn't shown.
Something like that would be a dream here unless you move 1-2 hours away from the city but I think when I get my own house, I'll put up at least one cobrahead, maybe a 100w or a 175w since the neighbours will probably be quite close.
Almost all of western Cranston was originally farmland but since the 80s it's become pretty built up. My neighborhood was actually paved in the 50s according to some city records but only a few homes in the area are that old. Almost all the homes in my neighborhood are late 70s to 90s era. My neighborhood was only a fraction of the size back then though. They've added extensions to the neighborhood in all directions. I'd like to have access to city maps and stuff and find out exactly when particular streets were made in my area. Would be cool to figure that out and be able to visualize what lights were originally in the neighborhood. The tapered arms are the oldest arms in my neighborhood and they're mid-60s through late 70s vintage. Either there were no lights in the neighborhood before that or they replaced the original incandescent lights with new MV lights and new arms in the 70s. There are some 1-1/4" upsweep arms on one street and those are 60s vintage and would have originally held incandescent lights and later 175W MV M-250R1s before getting 100W HPS M-250R2s and ultimately getting 20W AEL Autobahns (wrong wattage! Agh! But it was intentional since Cranston wants to streamline the wattages).
Over here the sketchy areas are in the north west areas of Toronto and in some parts of the eastern side of the city. Downtown is fairly safe but there are some panhandlers. Anyway my neighborhood was farmland up until the early 80s and the houses are all built early to mid 80s. In fact there was a farmhouse on my street until 2005 when it was demolished and three new houses built in 2007. I believe my street was one of the later neighbourhoods, other streets were built sometime in the 1970s and I think the arterials were built in the mid 60s since some poles still have vintage s arms and remote ballasts.
Interesting, the same value as your neighbour's house could probably only get a 1 bedroom condo in the city, that's even taking into account the USD-CAD exchange which would be around 380K CAD.