I photographed some streetlights. An overgrown GE that looked like something out of Centralia, PA and some HPS lights at Wendys.

I'm currently at a meetup of local people into lights...

Over the past couple of weeks I have been working on the lighting in my family's new lake house.  I have mostly gone through and replaced the CFL's with energy saving halogens that produce much nicer light. I installed proper outdoor floodlights and brought up some clip lamps with rough service light bulbs to illuminate the unfurnished rooms while we do other projects.  Today, I may choose some bulbs from my ReStore stash that will be good to use there. 

This past Friday I fixed a few parking lot lights (150W HPS). 

Pole 1- a couple of weeks ago initially had a starter that had given up the ghost after 15 years or so.  However- not having any extra starters laying around I threw in a new ballast kit.  My church gets em from Sylvania/Osram/whatever its called now for a decent price and with not knowing what kind of condition the original capacitor was in, it made sense.  Well after the install of the new kit plus a new Sylvania 150 HPS bulb, I fired up the parking lot light circuit.  The lamp started up VERY quick full brightness within 8 seconds) and then got brighter, and brighter.  The thermo overload/overtemp protection kicked in and killed the light, then it cycled back after about 30 seconds.  I quickly went to pull the tape from off of the photo cell to kill the circuit.  Thinking I may have had a bad bulb, I put another new one in, with the same results.  By then I was very tired and sun burning and decided to give up for now, so I pulled the bulb out of the socket and closed up, planning to come back with a new ballast.  Fast forward to Friday and I came back with the new ballast kit (this one from Advance/Philips) When I pulled the Osram ballast out that I had put in 2 weeks ago, a very unpleasant smell and mess was there to greet me.  See photo below.  I fried the sucker, good.  I put in the new ballast kit, but with the same results with the supercharged lamp.  It was then that it struck me that perhaps I was not wiring in the correct voltage lead from the ballast.  I was doing the 120v which most of my church buildings use for the parking lot.  I dragged the ladder over to another post and got up there to verify and sure enough, the parking lot circuit is running on 208V, not 120.  Back to the broken post and re-wired it for 208V and everything worked beautifully.  So.  I fried the Osram ballast by wiring it up to 120v instead of 208.  Oops.  I'll be more mindful in the future.   But for now, everything smells like burnt ballast and tar.  Yuck. 

I was lucky enough to find two boxes of GE 70 soft white Miser bulbs on eBay.  I bought them today and I'm looking forward to uploading them in my gallery in a few days.  I've seen lots of 55 and 95 watt Misers in my life, but the 70 watt ones are really rare 

Switched on some lights.

All I did today lighting wise was clean all the fixtures around the house from dust, with a slightly damp cloth. I also cleared the cobwebs that developed around the outdoor fixtures and the photocell.

ditto, the rent cheque from the insects bounced so I evicted them all from all the outdoor fixtures..

Yep, time to evict the freeloading pests! I had a number of spiders make residence inside the HPS bulkhead that were cooked by the lamp. The culprit was the rubber seal entering the bulkhead was a bit too large for the cabling so I used a small amount of silicone sealant as well to fill the gap.

Yesterday and today, I replaced 6 bad F32T12 (2 lamp)  Universal/Triad instant start ballasts that made it to about 10 years old.  New OSRAM F32T8 2-lamp ballasts.  Sylvania name is no longer on the ballasts it's now Osram.  Hmmm.  I also indulged my ADHD a bit and did a partial re-lamp of one of my churches basketball courts.  ANother building mechanic started throwing in F32T8 4100k lamps when they replaced burned out 3000k lamps and bad ballasts.  I did not like the mixture of colors in there.  In this instance, the 3000k looks much better in this setting, as the 3000k color reflects well with the color of the basketball floor and the color tone of the walls.  4100k just made it look.. eh.  yucky. 
I am using the 4100k lamps in the sunday school classrooms and other rooms around the church where the color tone of those room support the white color better.  It looks quite nice.  This is what it sorta looks like.  not the exact thing I did, but looks like it.

Fluorescent lamp above my living room window went EOL today. It was old GE 36w 35. It was quite rapid eol, the lamp showed sign of closing eol only few hours before it started flashing. Replaced it with philips tld eco 32w 840.

Well today, I sent HomeBrewLamps some thing to annoy the entire neighborhood with a 1000 watt HPS Ballast he's got the lamp already so they  should be able to sleep in darkness for about another week..

Other then that I'm in the process of cleaning out two mini gumdrop fixtures I found at an auction on the weekend and figuring out if I leave them as a MV or swap them out and run LPS, since they didn't come with a ballast the only thing that would get changed is the socket, does anyone know if the original sockets ever had porcelain around the shell of the socket in the vintage mini gum drops because these ones look to clean to be broken off..       

But for now, everything smells like burnt ballast and tar.  Yuck. 

Yep yuck. nasty smelling stuff.

Oh and the building back in that pic looks familiar...I think I've been by that place at some point. 

Yep yuck. nasty smelling stuff.

Oh and the building back in that pic looks familiar...I think I've been by that place at some point. 

There are about 8 of those designs in the metro area.  I work on 2 of em. 

Changed out some bad ballasts.  One did this to 2 year old tubes. 

Emailed the CEO of Philips, after getting no reply from their customer service in months about low pressure sodium lights, and there absence of information on anything historical that is made by Philips or Advance, I wonder what customer services reply will be like this time around, since I CC'd them in the email ?