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My 1990 AE Series 113 50W HPS After Cleaning
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.
Keywords: American_Streetlights

My 1990 AE Series 113 50W HPS After Cleaning

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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Filename:031217_009.JPG
Album name:Mike / American Streetlights
Keywords:American_Streetlights
Filesize:282 KiB
Date added:Mar 12, 2017
Dimensions:2048 x 1536 pixels
Displayed:138 times
URL:http://www.galleryoflights.org/mb/gallery/displayimage.php?pid=21576
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Comment 1 to 16 of 16
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lite_lover   [Mar 12, 2017 at 11:23 PM]
Nice save! Looks great after being cleaned up.
streetlight98   [Mar 13, 2017 at 12:44 AM]
Thanks Darren! I think since this was mounted under a tree canopy the paint wasn't affected too much by the sun. The other side of the light faced the sun and there's slightly more paint worn on that side. Also interesting, is the photocell has dry rotting only on one side because of the same reason. Well the top is also dryrotted too but that's pretty much a given.

This light is now installed in my room and running as I write this. Very Happy
ZarlogH46   [Mar 13, 2017 at 03:08 PM]
There is a 100w HPS version right across the street from my house that has been there for as long as I can remember. It was last relamped in 2011 so the end for it is probably coming soon (the GE lamps they use around here last about 6-8 years). The utilities around here don't even maintain HPS anymore, they either
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.
streetlight98   [Mar 13, 2017 at 11:19 PM]
If they replace the light they will most likely keep the arm up and simply change out the head. The reason this light was on the ground was because they replaced the pole and since the electric company no longer owns the lights in Cranston, it's the city's job to put the light back on the pole, so the electric company tapes the light and arm assembly to the base of the pole and then it's the city's responsibility. A recipe for disaster IMO. They should tape/tie the lights higher up on the pole or just leave the light installed on the old pole until the city has someone transfer the light over. That's what they do with phone company stuff; it stays on the old pole and eventually Cox or Verizon (the phone/cable providers here) will move the equipment over to the new pole (which sometimes takes years lol).

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!
streetlight98   [Mar 14, 2017 at 01:18 AM]
LOL I will miss the HPS fixtures I grew up seeing on a daily basis (many of which are already gone) but in generally I'll be happy to see whiter light at night. I will miss the character of drop lens cobraheads in general though.
joe_347V   [Mar 17, 2017 at 12:27 AM]
Wow, it cleaned up quite nicely for a 26 year old light.

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.
streetlight98   [Mar 17, 2017 at 01:57 AM]
Yeah I was surprised how nicely it cleaned up. I think because it was covered partially by a tree so the sun wasn't beaming on it all day.

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. Cool
joe_347V   [Mar 17, 2017 at 04:18 AM]
Heh, I can't wait until the snow melts and when I can put my Spherolite back on the deck. I brought it indoors before winter hit but I'll probably reinstall once it gets warmer.

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.
streetlight98   [Mar 17, 2017 at 03:41 PM]
I have an average size yard, though backyard is oddly shaped. The far back property line is just about 100ft long and that line is about 45ft back from the house. My front yard is quite small at 30ft X 50ft (the house being about 35ft from the street). If you count the driveway and the little strip of grass to the left of it, that brings my actual property length from 50ft to about 80ft end-to-end. So the yard tapers from 100ft at the far back line to 80ft at the far front line. The two sides property lines are both about 110ft.

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.
joe_347V   [Mar 17, 2017 at 11:47 PM]
Ahh, I roughly measured the entire property using Google, it's around 33' wide by 131' deep. A bit smaller compared to your yards lol.
streetlight98   [Mar 18, 2017 at 12:24 AM]
Yeah I noticed a lot of neighborhoods in Canada are very cramped with small yards and then there's miles of farmland around these dense neighborhoods. Why is that? Is land really expensive up there? Only urban neighborhoods here have homes that close together. Ironically my yard is small as far as homes in this area are concerned. I'm hoping to have a good few acres on a tree-lined lot. Plenty of room for some wood poles with lights and to build a nice outbuilding to serve as a workshop and indoor museum for my nicer lights such as the NOS and rather uncommon gems such as my restored OV-15 TuDor and my OV-10IB. I'll reserve the outdoor poles mainly for 60s-present cobraheads but I'll probably have a couple of NEMAs/bracket fixtures and some 400W MV floods (and maybe a 1000W MV too). I might even go crazy and install some of my HPS lights! They would be toward the far end of the property away from the house lol. I've been getting a decent number of HPS lights courtesy of the LED conversions going on in a lot of towns in the RI-CT-MA area and just lucky finds.
joe_347V   [Mar 18, 2017 at 12:33 AM]
Yeah the houses are quite cramped in most parts of the GTA unless you move out to where there's farmland. My house has a fairly large yard for it's size. I think most newer houses would have a backyard that's half as deep as mine. Anyway land and property in general is quite expensive in the GTA. Most houses here start at like 1 million. Shocked

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.
streetlight98   [Mar 18, 2017 at 12:58 AM]
Wow! The homes in my neighborhood are in the 200K to 350K range for the most part. My house falls somewhere in the middle of that. Some of the more "affluent" neighborhoods have homes in the 1 million range but they're laid out on like 2 acres of land and are practically borderline mansions with five car garages and all sorts of bells and whistles. Cranston has higher property taxes than most neighboring cities/towns but the schools are better and the neighborhoods are pretty quiet, even on the more urban/sketchy side of town. Cranston is interesting since the eastern side is pretty urban and partially ghetto (not dangerous at all, but you'll see pan-handlers and people walking the streets at all hours of the night. Not too much crime though). And the more westward you go the more rural it gets.

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).
joe_347V   [Mar 18, 2017 at 08:49 PM]
Yeah it's quite crazy here here's a sample of current listings and most houses in the GTA are quite expensive. Shocked . The homes in my area are around 900K-1.9 million and I believe mine is around 1.2 million. I believe the affluent neighbourhoods here have houses ranging from 5 to 10+ million

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.
streetlight98   [Mar 18, 2017 at 09:20 PM]
Darn that's nuts! Is it true though that Canadians tend to make more money though? (offsetting some of that cost?) I wonder why property is so valuable in Canada since there seems to be quite a bit of land available. Does the government tax the heck out of it or something? I just looked up my house and it's about 279K. My next-door neighbors are selling their house if you want to move to RI. Razz If you flip through the pictures you can see my still-unpainted shed on the left hand side. Very Happy
joe_347V   [Mar 20, 2017 at 03:56 AM]
I guess in a bit yes, and also the value of the Canadian dollar is a bit lower now. Property outside the GTA and the city in general is still quite cheap as well as most parts of Canada.

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.

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