Update: I went by this tonight and I saw that this OVX is already burnt out.

^ Cooper quality do you remember what lighting company it was doing the work?

Burnt out OR bad lamp..... my lineman friend had to replace lamp that simply wont light up! but when I got the lamp in different ballast, it works fine on a different ballast! Sometimes a lamp refuses to start up because probably the line voltage is a bit too low to fire up...so it refuses to start....

Yes I have seen brand new OVX that got installed but never light up......but most of the OVX I see get installed usually does fine....just may be 1 out of 20 or so doesn't work as far as I have seen........and about 1 out of 10 get burnt out within 5 years or so..

Here most OVXs seem to cycle with in a year, recently 250 watt HPS 115s seem to have major problems, out of the 20 or so I have seen installed within the last few months more than 10 are out An just to annoy me more a R47 I had reported as cycling (that was still working) was replaced with a 115 yesterday

Yes 250 watt OVX tend to cycle pretty early.....happens here........

Honestly for 250 watt they should use a medium sized fixture instead of small sized fixture....in my area my electrical company uses GE M-400A3s with sag lens for 250 watt and 400 watt....they seem to run the lamps fairly well for between 3 to 5 years....

Well don't forget Jace that 250 watt MV was fine for a small fixture so I can see how the trend continued, most of the 250 watt fixtures here are either a Powerlite R37 or R47 but they don't tend to cycle early luckily.

I noticed that the M-250R2 over the onramp was replaced with a OV 15 recently.

And yeah medium fixtures seem to be the way to go for 200-400w HPS.

Cool, do you remember what company was doing the work?

Not sure, can you tell by looking at the truck pic above?

But anyways I'm guessing Powerstream, the local utility or Stacey Electric, who I know maintains the traffic signals in my area.

The pole with the OVX looks shorter than the other poles.

Looks like this was taken by the Toll-Road. xD Easy to tell because of the powerline Setup.

How many wires are on one string? Like 4 bundled together? o.o

I'd say the pole if shorter because it is beneath the high voltage lines, yes this is near the 407, the only toll road around here.

Why do the power lines have lots of wires bundled on them? What does that do?

I know of a few like that in Denver.. Not many. I know one stirng of power lines with one side had a bundle of two (and that side had one of the insulators holding the wire (two sets of disc insulators in the shape of a V) Just one like that, the rest were just one set hanging down, the 5 of the rest. (if you understand that o.o)

One side had a bundle with two wires, the other side just had one.

It allows them to carry 4 times as much current on the same pole, it makes sense to me, you could have 6 wires per pole of do this and have 24 wires per pole. Not all are like that, there are many older setups around that have single wires.

But one bundle of 4 wires acts like one wire right? Just with more current.

What are the voltage of these lines?

Accordign to Tony, this wire "bundling" is called Hendrix construction. National Grid uses this on some primary line set ups.

bundled conductors are to reduce corona discharge at higher voltages,higher voltage lines can carry more power anyway because there's reduced current at higher voltages,in Texas our 345 KV lines are Double Bundled even 230 KV Lines...i doubt the bundling is to enhance current carrying capacity.

Update: I guess the OVX really did die in less than a month it's now a FCO 125. Same wattage though.

-----[24 Dec 2011 at 22:34]-----
Apparently they never fixed the OVX it's been out since last January and it was installed last December so it's been out for longer than it was working.

And I'm really sure why they decided to use a 250w lume in place of the old 150w GE M-250R2.

Maybe they just wanted a FCO fixture so they replaced it. still though, what a waste in that case.

Most likely it died because it was never relamped, that's my guess anyways...

Yeah those Cooper ignitors don't seem to be fighters when it comes to cycling lamps. Two of the M-250R2s I reported on Rte 37 started cycling around Valentine's Day. Only about three months in. It's still onlt those two cycling though. NGrid didn't even bother to relamp the offramps or merges either. Nor did they relamp the intersecting freeway, I-295. The only thing is that the poles on RIDOT's lights (ones controlled by individual PCs are actually serviced by NGrid) don't have pole numbers so i can't report individual lights without counting the poles myself which I don't plan on doing.