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400W HPS M-400 Lighting the Yard
...with a 400W MV lamp! I yanked out the ignitor and swapped the 400W HPS lamp for a 90s Philips 400W /DX MV lamp, which has light hours on it. The lamp came from Joe. I forget when it was installed but it was like 1990-1992 and it was removed during the 1994 HPS onslaught IIRC. 
Keywords: American_Streetlights

400W HPS M-400 Lighting the Yard

...with a 400W MV lamp! I yanked out the ignitor and swapped the 400W HPS lamp for a 90s Philips 400W /DX MV lamp, which has light hours on it. The lamp came from Joe. I forget when it was installed but it was like 1990-1992 and it was removed during the 1994 HPS onslaught IIRC.

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Album name:Mike / My General Electric M-400 (2009)
Keywords:American_Streetlights
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Date added:Jun 16, 2017
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URL:http://www.galleryoflights.org/mb/gallery/displayimage.php?pid=21995
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Comment 1 to 8 of 8
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joe_347V   [Jun 17, 2017 at 07:12 AM]
Interesting, maybe I should try it with my OVF, never seen one of those in MV before.
streetlight98   [Jun 17, 2017 at 02:34 PM]
I don't think an ED/BT37 lamp will fit in the OVF. On their spec sheet it says 400W MH lamps must be reduced envelope. Same with the OVY but the OVD did allow full size ED37 lamps.
streetlight98   [Jun 18, 2017 at 03:13 AM]
I tried the proper HPS lamps in this and it was needless to say, a glarebomb. I think the socket is set to the lower position. If I raise the socket higher up in the reflector, it would probably be a little less glary and wouldn't throw the light as high up on the neighbors' houses lol.
joe_347V   [Jun 28, 2017 at 06:52 AM]
Heh, I should have bought that NOS 400w clear tubular MV I saw at Restore a couple years ago lol. Anyway I didn't buy it when I balked at the $20 they wanted for it.

I've never lit anything HID over 100w in my yard before, I think if I installed my 400w HPS OVF in my backyard or even my Crimefighter, all my neighbours would kill me. Laughing
streetlight98   [Jun 28, 2017 at 03:05 PM]
LOL. My neighbors next door to me don't have side windows (neither do I) and my neighbors behind my house are really nice people and usually have their shades drawn anyway. Plus I don't leave the lights on past 10PM in the summer (doesn't get fully dark until like 9:30 around here this time of year anyway lol). In fact, the husband is a general contractor who built my house! For years he owned his land and the land my house was built on (so he owned the width of the block between my street and his) and decided to build a house on it and so my house was born!

Yeah those tubular MV lamps are cool. I have some from Webster. I can use them in my GE PF-400s. GE did make PF-400s in 400W MV, so the ED37 lamps should fit but I had trouble getting one in, since mine are 400W HPS so the socket is probably set differently for the ET18 lamps. My tubular lamps are buried somewhere in one of those big white boxes of lamps in my shed (I have five of them, each with like 30-50 assorted lamps; the ~50 lamp ones are all BT25s and ED23.5s while the lesser quantities are for larger ED28/BT28 and ED37/BT37 lamps).

Oh yeah I had my crimefighter installed with a 200W mogul base incandescent just to see what it was like and that thing spread the light ALL over the neighborhood lol. From a 200W incandescent lamp! That's like maybe 3000 lumens and the place was lit up like daytime. Imagine a 250W CMH lamp in our crimefighters? You could light up a massive field with that lol. The crimefighter buckets are weird though since they don't properly align, the light is focused in a X shape with two prongs of the X longer than the other two, which creates a random pattern instead of a uniform pool of light. I suppose with a /DX lamp the pattern would be (at least slightly) diffused and less apparent.
joe_347V   [Jun 29, 2017 at 05:17 AM]
I guess the bigger yards in your neighbourhood also help too, my house is located next to a corner so if I stuck something super bright in my yard it'd probably shine into like 5 houses. My backyard does have a lot of shrubs and trees so that might help with the glare lol.

I'd imagine you'd probably have to use a different set of mounting holes for the socket and switch out or rotate the lamp support to fit a ED-37 lamp. I believe on the Widelite F series, you had to flip the lamp support to switch from BT/ET to ED lamps.

Interesting about the lighting pattern, I light a /DX lamp in mine so I didn't really notice notice the pattern, I also never mounted it too and I gues you can't really see it upside down lol. Mine has a MH ballast so I could always use a MH lamp for the extra brightness lol.

Speaking of Crimefighters, I spotted another one in the wild today. It seems that they are quite common in Canada. Perhaps CGE offered them at one point in the 60s as a alternative to NEMA heads.
streetlight98   [Jun 29, 2017 at 09:45 PM]
Ah yeah I noticed the yards in the Toronto area are quite small. I think even my yard is tiny but if my yard were in the GTA it would be considered a double-lot or something lol.

Yeah I'll have to take a closer look at the PF-400s someday.
joe_347V   [Jun 30, 2017 at 02:25 AM]
Yeah, even from your here it looks like a double lot in my neighbourhood. Unfortunately, you'd have to the pay the equivalent of a mansion in your area to get a large lot here.

Comment 1 to 8 of 8
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