the southern stretch of the section of van nuys blvd that contain these poles were recently converted to LED, about 1-2 months ago. this is facing north, further up there are still lots of HPS cobraheads on these poles, 150w HPS.
It probably will if they're actually setting the drivers at a lower current than standard. (I believe Tony has a light that can do that) It probably won't dim out as fast too.
I remember when they were triple M400 Mercury whiteways in the 70's and early 80's and really showed off our cars well on Wed. cruise night back when Van Nuys Blvd. was THEE hot spot. Crazy cars and crazy girls. Boy, I missing those days !
At a local shopping center here in Cranston, RI, they're putting up new LED shoebox lights to replace 320w PSMH M-1000s, finned split foor OV-50s, and even an early AE 17-000 along with GE M-400A2s, Hubbell RLGs, and modern M-400s and M-400A and an OVX. The M-1000s were 1000W MV and the OV-50s and 17-000 were either 700 or 1kw MV. The M-400A2s and RLGs were HPS as well as the OVX. and the newish M-400s and M-400As were factory 320W PSMH. They converted all the lights a few years ago and now that the Borders got torn down, they're redoing the parking lot lighting since it's too dim. the LED poles are close together and slightly lower than the cobraheads so maybe the light will be good from the LEDs. They don't look like LEDs either since they're no heatsinks but they are indeed LEDs.
what's the point of Three 150 Watt heads anyway? wouldn't a single 400 Watt do the same thing? except cheaper? one fixture,verses three to fail...the only benefit I really see in redundant heads is if one fails the others will still make light.
These are left over from the whiteway lighting days of the 60's reminiscent of the 3kW Hollywood specials and Chicago's Lake Street triple head fluorescents. Everybody wanted to be Americas "brightest town" when mercury was new and electricity was cheap. The mindset still works today, brightly lit business districts do more business. The Van Nuys pitchforks remain because they are iconic to the area and are currently undergoing LED retrofitting.
Yeah, better to have three dimmer lights than one really bright one. I think that's especially true with the LEDs lol.
Anyway, another reason for the three heads is for energy saving, they could switch off the outer lights after midnight when there's less traffic to save energy. The double lights on the 401 in Oshawa were originally wired up like that.
Yeah the tripple heards offer more flexability. Plus thet look pretty sweet! Here some of the relay-controlled freeway lights are switched off at 12-2AM and turned back on at 4 or 5AM. This saves energy but chews through lamps because the lamps get two starts per day instead of one. The couple hours of rest in the middle of the night might make up for that though...
I saw a story in a 1962 edition of Electrical Construction and Maintenance concerning the St. Louis relighting at that time, removing incandescent streetlighting on reinforced concrete poles to the "wishbone" style and the 2XM1000 luminaires on prestressed concrete poles. BTW, these lights don't look half bad on these poles.
Login
But would deff be good if 1 were to fail...
Anyway, another reason for the three heads is for energy saving, they could switch off the outer lights after midnight when there's less traffic to save energy. The double lights on the 401 in Oshawa were originally wired up like that.