Fluorescent street lighting
 

Did any one had the chance to see the glimps of fluroescent street ligthining. I mean with fluorscent tubes, not High Pressure Mercury "bulbs".
In Romania we had them too. Nicknamed "lămpi banană (banana lamps)", officially code C.E.B. 340. But they dind't last long here either... 10 maxium years. I've seen just a pair in my life (but some one found another ones in Bucharest). They where in a non-working condition on a pole on an old gas station near me. Got repaled in the early '000 (2000's). Well, the gas station got closed in a few years and the colums left (some prewar gas staion from Bucharest had underground toilets and above there where masonery colums) got demolished (except 2) at the end of last year or at the begining of this year.
But I'm curios how was the street lighting with fluorescent tubes?

We went from sodium-vapor lamps to LED's here. Gone is the orange glow...and hello, intense white light!

On one avenue (the one that is going from University to the East areas of Bucharest) they installed in some places L.E.D. lamps. In some places, because on the portion of the avenue that I'm talking about there are still left Sodium lamps... the white light - orange lihght alternance is very disturbing for the eyes.

We still have a privately owned set of trails outside of town that bought surplus fluorescent streetlights about 20 years ago. They are quite spectacular. I ended up buying two from them as they are starting to replace them with LED heads as their ballasts and bulbs fail. They are made by a Canadian company called Powerlite who also installed fluorescent all over Toronto's highway network back in the day.

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a1.../CGS_7792a.jpg
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a1.../CGS_7792a.jpg

We have a few places in town that still have fluorescent lamps out in their parking lots however there's only two I regularly see working. One is outside the oversize wash bay of a car wash and another is at the back of a subdivided car dealership-turned modular home retailer. Our city has otherwise not run fluorescent lighting streetside since the late 60's. You can still however see the old lamp standards along the two main drags. They don't hang over the road as much as fluorescent was much more directional.
I have always wondered how you make fluorescent lamps give out any useful level of light when it's -25c out. I think someone once mentioned you could get lamps fitted with a heater and thermostat to keep the bulbs warmer so they would strike better.

Only place I've seen them is in OLD gas stations...IIRC I've seen some running at some point most gas stations that have them are either defunct or doing poorly enough as to not bother keeping them working.

Chicago has been a high pressure sodium city for pretty much ever. Just recently moving over to LEDs. However, my shop is in Evanston, and the street lights there are pretty new (~5 years) and I always thought they were some kind of HID, metal halide or whatever. A couple weeks ago, I looked up close while one was lighting, and to my surprise I found it was actually an induction fluorescent! The bulb is a rectangular loop. I honestly didn't know there were any street lamps like that.

But otherwise no. lol

State Street for a while ran a few blocks of fluorescent. According to the internet it was all radio controlled.

https://image.slideserve.com/48584/slide13-n.jpg

Looks ridiculous if you ask me. That is four lamps per pole.

This brought back something I haven't thought of in years, if ever.

I can't remember fluorescent street lamps but I'm almost sure they were used at Grocery and Department Stores in the parking lots.

In Bucharest (trolleybuses still run there; that portion of boulevard is called nowday Regina Elizebata and on the uphill side it's going to that avenue with variation of lighting): http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yBuaXM1mcZ...iu-Dej1975.jpg Picture is from around 1966-1967. By 1971, those lamps where gone.
Here is an colour picture: http://i.imgur.com/PcGAdxvl.jpg Same avenue, but uphill. The downhill is a river valley, dug by Dâmobviţa (Dâmbovitza) River, the main river of Bucharest.

When I was based in Munster-Lager Germany they had fluorescent's in the town centre, never noticed them in England though.... On our street we have orange low pressure sodium, yellow high pressure sodium & blue/white Led's. They seem to be replacing the low & high pressure sodium's with LED's, when a sodium goes 'phut' they'll replace it with an LED, a main bypass road nearby has gone all LED. Personally I prefer the high pressure sodium but they never asked me...

Fluorescents are generally sub-optimum for operation in cold climates. Fixtures have to be specially designed to prevent low output and random flickering.

If you're a Chicagoan of my age you can recall those State Street fluorescent lamps being brighter than other streets. Then along came much brighter mercury vapor lamps, bright enough on the main streets that people would forget to turn on their headlights when leaving a gas station. Those were replaced by even brighter high pressure sodium, used for a long time until LEDs started to become available. There is currently some not-completely verified research that the bright bluish white LEDs could disturb sleep rythms or have other effects, and the suggestion is to use "warm white" LEDs instead. Similar negative claims were made about mercury vapor, but apparently never got any traction.

There is experimental evidence that the color temperature that appears most neutral depends on the lighting level, and esthetically, artifical light should be "warmer" (lower color temperature) at low levels like street lighting, and daylight (higher) color temperature only in applications where the light levels are quite high, like a glassed-in atrium. I experienced this personally in the high definition TV trials in the 1990s, where the test viewing room was lit with D65 fluorescents lamps as a low level background to the TV pictures, which are much brighter but standardized at D65 white. On entering the room, I could not convince myself that the light was actually neutral. The human visual system's "color constancy" can simultaneously identify white objects in that light as white (not blue) while seeing that the overall light is bluish.

So, whether or not the "bright white" LED street lights have any health effects at all, most people dislike them, and changing to "soft white" color temperature will fix that.

I don't like cold L.E.D. But here I don't think we will get warm white.
In Bucharest winters may be sometimes very cold.

Oh, here are 2 "bananas" left in Bucharest. The pictures where taken by a street light hobbyst. There are 4 left on that yard: one complete, one without the glass but with an fluorescent tube into it and the other 2 even worse shape.

Interesting thread as I don't recall ever seeing these on city streets. Like Eric mentioned, I associate these with older parking lots. A couple weeks ago I filled up with gas next door to a former Ford dealership which appears to have been closed for 20-30 years. They had a bunch of that type of fixture.

Oh hey I recognize those. The parking lot behind our city's museum and archives now that you mention it has fluorescent lighting and it is all well maintained.

Still beats me how they work fine at minus 20-25 degress Celsius. In an 1962 book I found out that the ones used in Romania worked 'till -15 ° C.

There's still some LOW pressure sodium around where I grew up on Long Island. You know, the ones that start out neon red and turn yellow after a while...

Great Job !
 

:) I would like to commend Telecolor3007 for your command of the English language . I know of native English speakers who couldn't spell "Fluorescent" to save their lives and to see and read your well written posts time after time made me want to say "Great Job" . I realize with the availability of "spell check" anyone SHOULD be able to produce great writing in any chosen language but a quick look around most English speaking forums will prove that it's usually the native English speakers who make the most blunders . Your well written posts make them a pleasure to respond to , rather than the "seek & find" often played while reading some native speaker's posts .

:thmbsp: So again , great job , and in this case I'm sorry I don't have much to add to your Fluorescent street lighting discussion . For a guy as technically minded as myself I'm now kinda surprised I've never really given much thought as to what's lighting the roads beyond my two (or four) headlights .....

around 2000 i lived in a small town in eastern Michigan called Cass City, it still had flourescent streetlights. but last Time I drove through they had been replaced with high pressure sodium.

@ init4fun : well, it's good there is "Google" for help. Sometimes I don't know how to write some words and I'm looking for help.
English is somehow my second language. My parents intended that I will learn English from an ealy age, I studied English at school starting with the 2nd grade. To be onest only at 15-16 I got more into understanding the language and I still have more to learn.

I don't recall fluorescent street lighting but I do remember seeing them in parking lots of malls, stores, gas stations. I remember around 1979 or so, there was a drive from mercury bulbs to sodium vapor, Mom never liked the orange glow either. There were a few old areas of Pittsburgh that still retained the old pre-WWI street lighting with the old incandescent bulbs up into the 1990's. I did a look on the internet for those old street lamps and the ones I remember date from 1912 or so. Here in Eastern Ohio, they did a lot of work to convert to LED's

Well, I proved your point, I needed spellcheck to spell "fluorescent." :D

You still had incadescent street lighting in the '80's? Wow.

Chicago: http://www.cera-chicago.org/Blog/3304314

In the late 80's or early 90's I bought a very large incandescent bulb at a local freight salvage store, just as a novelty. It appeared to be old stock from the 60's or 70's, a GE. It had unusual markings-I think it included an amp rating but no wattage; had a mogul base. I finally tried it in an old lamp with one of those bases. As the educated on here could guess, when I flipped the switch there was a flash of light, the filament burned out and the circuit breaker tripper. I later learned it was used in a special type of street lamp circuit-series string, I think. I still have the bulb and package because it's kind of neat to look at.

No kidding, and some native English speakers are such poor spellers that they give the impression of never having finished the third grade.

As for your car, am I correct in guessing it is equipped with sealed beam headlights? I don't see many vehicles that are old enough to be so equipped.

I don't recall seeing any fluorescent street lights, but I did get an antique three-tube T12 fluorescent fixture for free last week. Two tubes were done for but the ballast is fine. It has a rapid-start ballast but it also has knock-out plates for preheat starters. It's filthy right now but I cleaned a small part of it to see how it will turn out; it's in very good condition, perhaps all that filth helped to preserve it. The fixture was made by Electrolier Manufacturing Company in Montréal; I haven't been able to find out when they were in business.

The system used a constant current set-up. An old Master's Electrician's handbook explained how the system worked. There was some kind of a reactor with a movable core and weight arrangement that moved in or out to maintain the current.
Each socket had a shunt that would arc through when the lamp went O/C.
There was well over 1000 volts open circuit.

This is the first time I have seen the word "electrolier" and a quick search shows it to be a widely used generic term, so good luck finding the company that used it as a trade name.

This is interesting - history of Los Angeles street lighting:
http://bsl.lacity.org/history.html

I also ran across something called induction lighting - a long-life electrode-less fluorescent lamp used for street lighting:
https://www.accessfixtures.com/induction_lighting/

It is based on inventions of Nikola Tesla long ago.

When I worked at the science museum in Chicago, one part of the electricity demonstration was lighting an ordinary fluorescent tube wirelessly by high frequency induction. We did some tricks (probably originated by Tesla, although I didn't know at the time), like "wiping" the light on and off the tube.

The 1964-65 New York World's Fair had lighting fixtures ("luminaires") that used a special flat panel fluorescent lamp:
http://www.lamptech.co.uk/Spec%20She...0Panel%20F.htm

Manufacture of these panels was discontinued after a few years partly because of poor lifetime due to problems in sealing them thoroughly during manufacture.

Here are some pictures of the luminaires:
https://www.worldsfairphotos.com/nywf64/luminaires.htm

I vaguely remember fluorescents at gas stations & private lots.
They used tubes & were set at a 45 deg angle.
The big thing especially out west is the BIG telescopes can be
made useless by some lighting for some types of research.
Been a big push for years to change out the bad lighting & make
it much more directional. http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/abo...s-intermediate
I sure would like darker skies. You can still see the milky here way but
the sky glow is closing in on us.

73 Zeno:smoke:
LFOD !

Considering that they were used in circuits that run at such high voltages, and that it tripped the breaker, I doubt it's burned out. Have you seen a broken filament or checked it for continuity?
Hard to tell what such a reply is supposed to suggest but it didn't surprise me.

The label is fully intact and more than just printed letters, and I know where the company was based so it shouldn't be that hard. Besides, information for many things Canadian is very difficult to find on Google so I'll just have to check other sources.

Just commiserating with you on how some info gets buried or doesn't exist on the otherwise "knows-all, tells-all" internet, and truly wishing you luck on finding it.

I have seen these appear around here over the last decade. Nearby strip mall replaced their sodium with them, there is two or three used at the university before the next annual budget went all-LED and a few of the MoT rest stops have them. Supposedly they operate on the same principle as fluorescent but with no electrodes they are overall better technology as they last longer, use less power and have a much larger striking range.

I remember seeing fluorescent lighting at gas stations when I was growing up, but not so much as street lighting. At least one former gas station (now a body shop) still turns on their fluorescent lights at night. One current gas station lit theirs for a year or so, but didn't bother to turn it off during the day! It's been off ever since; not sure if the tubes/ballast failed, or if they just don't bother anymore.

Up until the early-mid '90s, my town used mercury vapor street lighting. We lived on a small private road, and still had an incandescent streetlight. Around the time the town converted their streetlights to sodium vapor, they took down our streetlight, and didn't replace it for a few years, upon which they replaced it with a sodium vapor one which is still there.

A few years ago, I found an American Electric street light head in a trash pile across the street from my house. It's equipped with a 100W GE mercury vapor bulb, and a ballast coil of some sort. I'm not sure how to wire it up; I tried connecting a 120V cheater cord to its terminals, but no dice. Guessing it needs 240 or 277V, but I have no real idea how I'd accommodate it in that regard. Here are some pictures of it:

http://www.electronixandmore.com/ada...ght/bottom.jpg
http://www.electronixandmore.com/ada...ght/inside.jpg

There's a hotel/Tiki bar in East Vancouver called the Waldorf that refurbished the exterior about a decade ago so it was no longer a super seedy bar and hooker hang-out. Along with restoring the exterior to it's original style they replaced all the original fluorescent lighting along the roofline and it ran happily for years. About two years ago however the building changed owners and it rapidly fell into disrepair. They removed it all for good in the spring as they are slowly pushing the plot through city hall for redevelopment. Not sure though why you would want to pay Vancouver rates though for a condo that overlooks the docks and both a chicken rendering and processing plant.

http://www.ryeberg.com/wp-content/up...1-1023x682.jpg

Edited: I forgot I also did some digging and found photos of my town in the late 60's when the main drags were still fluorescent.

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a1...Bucket/_58.jpg
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a1...Bucket/_58.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a1...1939_small.jpg
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a1...1939_small.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a1...et/293_001.jpg
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a1...et/293_001.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a1...et/954_001.jpg
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a1...et/954_001.jpg

The same street, but a few years later. Note the sodium heads.

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a1...et/804_001.jpg
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a1...et/804_001.jpg

Yeah, we did, I know some areas in Pittsburgh that had it until the 1990's. I remember driving my grandmother at the time and she said that she "remembers those old streetlights from the time when she was a little girl." (she was born in 1912) IIRC, I remember seeing some of them in the older Robinson/Kennedy Township areas, McKees Rocks and West End in the Western side of the Pittsburgh area.

It looked a lot like the pic I posted below.

http://www.vintagestreetlights.com/g...ler/joe007.jpg

Saw this one in Santa Monica, CA a week ago. There’s quite a few of these old fixtures out there still, often hidden in plain view.

Pasadena, CA and some parts of Detroit still have this kind of lighting today. IIRC it’s series-string lighting.

The one from Santa Monica looks more like '80'-'90's.

I also saw a similar streetlamp on a bridge in Steubenville, Ohio although it looks more updated.