Just thought I'd say what's up.
I am an electrician in the USAF stationed in Germany, so if there are any weird German lamp pic requests, I can try to get some for ya.
So far these are the most common German lamps:
Exterior:
- Most of the HID lights you are all already familiar with, except Germany uses LPS (55W on base) to light up crosswalks. Smaller cities also use them as regular streetlights.
- There is also extensive use of single and dual tube 58W flourescent street lights that look like they were converted from ~180W LPS.
Industrial:
- Same ol HPS and MH lamps you're used to in the States, with the differences being the ballasts.
- External capacitors and ignitors, but that's not the difference... difference is the super cheap terminals they use.
- Extensive use of 58W Flourescent tubes also.
Business/household:
- Widespread use of those 12V halogen spotlights
- 13-20W CFLs
- 18W T8 ~2' Flourescent
- 36W T8 ~4' Flourescent
- Not many incandescent lights, Germany is REALLY energy concious
With the flourescent lamps, Germany seemed to skip a generation. There are still new fixtures (along with nearly 99% of currently installed fixtures) with external starters. Seems like 1950s technology to me, but hey, it's reliable. IIRC, it's all preheat technology.
They are just now starting to phase in electronic ballasts, but they seem to have a very high failure rate and are more difficult to change out than the old external starter ballasts.
The old ballasts have 2 connections, which make it nice and simple when hooking stuff up!
But if you ask me, these euro lights are crap! You need a 7 level (~5mm flat head) screwdriver to be able to connect any wires to terminals (even in HID setups). New fad is to use push in compression style connections, which makes it REALLY easy to hook up, but I don't think the connection is quite as good as a screw terminal!
