Hi there, first proper post, but something very nice happened this week

We have this nice road all lid by HPS lamps, they emmit lovly orange color
Well at Thursday 28.03.2024 at night a tree fail direcly on the base of the lamp, bending the post and sadly smashing the whole base (I was looking for the ballast, but could only find shards of glass and bent metal)
Here is a pictures: https://imgur.com/a/jhUtU9u


I thought that has to be the end of SON for this road, I mean if the bulb gets out they replace the bulb, but if the base gets destroyed, they would surly replace the whole base with LED
That would be horrible since, the lights were fine, and there would be this ugly white LED between all the other orange lights


But I emailed our local cuncil that takes care of the lights in our region (because I knew that if I don't someone else will (because this light was in the middle and it was noticable) and asked them if they could replace it with an orange SON light, because orange better suits the enviroment and everything else was orange

Yesterday the post was replaced: https://imgur.com/a/FonC7kR

And today (03.04.2024) I was plesently suprised to see the light replaced, but not by LED, by SON, yep, the whole base was replaced by SON

But not only that, also the light that was pulsing for years (4 years to be exact, first it turned to pink, then it started to pulse (white, pink, off, white, pink, off), it would come on very very rarly (but it was pink, it was never orange) was also replaced. I never told anyone about it, because I was afraid that if I did, they would change it for LED, I would rather have a pulsing light, then LED)

So yea, here is a picture of a brand new (I think, its nicly orange, which means new for SON right?) HPS: https://imgur.com/a/e4sMNrr (on camera its yellow, because I don't know how to make it orange, and I didn't have a film camera on hand)

And bonus content, a walk under the lights: https://youtu.be/uG2XzjSLUHE

This lights were installed in 2006/2007 I believe, before there were no lights there, and most of them (apart from the pulsing one) still work fine (only 3 of them were replaced (1 (second one if u walk up the hill on the video) in 2020, and 2 of them today

We have also have an LED light on the other corner of the street (the last white light on the video), it was installed in 2014 and broke in 2020 (probably the power suply broke, the led was fine), its very interesting how much longer SON lasts compared to LED, but people still prefer LED for some unknown reson (I like orange light at night more then I like white)

 There is a good reason to prefer LED: efficiency is significantly higher than with SON lamps (only SOX lamps can keep up with LED, but those only are still made in india or china) and you can get them in literally all color temperatures you want, so you can order them to suit the exact situation you are in. Finally, they don't contain mercury. A single lamp breaking is no big deal, but because literal millions of fluorescent or discharge lamps were made every week, all those little 10mg doses started to add up.

I live near an industrial estate with extra warm white LED lamps. Opposite the terrain is a parking lot with SON. You cannot distinguish between the two from a distance, and when walking right under them, the most obvious difference is the slightly better color rendering (they're blue limited so the CRI is not great, but that's intentional).

For our old discharge lamps, it's a matter of being charmed by their quirks. I know i love old stuff, even when it's objectively worse. I keep a stash of MV and SON lamps around, just for fun.

But for professional use, many of them have gone obsolete, surpassed by new technologies that are objectively better. So far i've not seen dead LED street lighting in my city, with the exception of some PL replacements that went blue. But that's a well known issue, no different than any other new tech teething issues.

Well, I like old discharge lamps because of their changing color when starting, but if I had to choose between them, I would choose SOX (I realy like the yellow color it produces and its also better for light polution I read)

I have nothing against leds (at least what I saw, hid lamps last longer then leds, but thats probably not the leds fault), if only they would use the same color of orange, but nobody does that, they all choose this white leds (at least thats the case in Slovenia)

We already had white hid lights (Mercury Vapor and Metal Halide), then we went to yellow sox and son, probably for some specific reason

So why go back to white now if we already had yellow in the past, why just not use this yellow leds that mimic sox or son

Nobody would even notice the change

A lot of councils are still refitting HPS, while the lamps still exist, and it is indeed unusual for a downed pole to be put back as HPS, so win win there 
Unfortunately over the December of 2016, our whole town went from 35 years of SOX to 4000K of LED in just 3 weeks! 

I had seen that 2000k and below leds were very high power consuming (some even 27lm/w!). Hope this technology gets better so that it becomes less power consuming and I don't get glare bombed by 6500k led streetlights at night.

https://www.lighting-gallery.net/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-213109

Bad picture, but these are actually LED fixtures. The color looks a lot like HPS.

Wow, this are bearly noticable

I hope that people will start to use this more

Realy not sure why nobody liked sox, its mono color, its more efficient then led, it was great at night when u wanted to see the start (just filter yellow out and you have ur stars)

We already had white mercury vapor ones, then we swiched to yellow, then back to white like we forgot why we wanted yellow in the first place