Gallery of Lights
The Site => General discussion => Topic started by: Jace the Gull on January 13, 2011, 06:04:15 PM
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Just for fun, often each electrical company/contractor (sometimes depending on who works for the streetlights) usually chooses the color of a Photocell as a standard and will sometimes change overtime in many years.
For my area
Baltimore Gas and Electric: as from what I have seen, they most commonly today are using black photocells in most cases which almost all setups are 120 volts, but I was told they use blue for the higher voltage setup which I am not 100% sure. Before they started using black ones, they were grey, and before that Fisher Pierce made them with clear plastic with colored paint inside back in the 60s early 70s. And they were light blue in this case.
PEPCO: I am honestly not sure there seems to be too many variety of them in use, although I will have to look again since they did a recent group fixes since a lot of the mercs are now brighter and dayburners were turned off, but I am not sure if they replaced PCs for ones that did not dayburn. But I believe I saw some old PCs still in use.
The state of MD. Most cases I see they are blue..rich blue! But some installations I see are using Intermatic Inc PCs which has large voltage number around it.
Other areas are unknown for me for now.
How about your area/electrical company/city....
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Here we use grey coloured ones since all most all of the lights here are 120 volt,
The standard colour codes are
120 volt: grey
240 volt: maroon
multi-volt: dark blue
347 volt: green
480 volt: yellow
Black is just a option for all PC's
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In my area I have an interesting mix of older 120V circuits and newer 240V circuits. Thus I noticed three different colours:
- Grey, in 120V areas, with some blue multi-volts on recently serviced streetlights.
- Red in 240V areas, like in the street I live in, and many other residential areas developped from the late 70s to the early 90s.
- Blue multi-volt, which seems to be the prefered replacement lately. They mix with reds and greys in their respective areas.
I got a green 105V - 305V photocontrol with a energy-saving timer from the local public utility, it was apparently a beta test that never happened to get done. It does make sense as I never saw any green photocontrol in service (and I've been at least once in every street in my city!).
I will go to Trois-Rivières, QC (home of the former Canadian Westinghouse factory) in March, and I'll pay attention to the photocontrols used in the area!
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Here they use FP Sun-Tech photocells that are gray and VERY sensitive to light. They have like a 2-3 second time delay and work really well. I know this because a friendly lineman gave me one. Before that, they used brown PCs.
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I've seen mostly black ones.