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Old 06-02-2018, 02:52 PM
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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?
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Old 06-02-2018, 03:38 PM
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We went from sodium-vapor lamps to LED's here. Gone is the orange glow...and hello, intense white light!
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Old 06-02-2018, 04:13 PM
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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.
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Old 06-02-2018, 06:35 PM
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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

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.

Last edited by MIPS; 06-02-2018 at 06:43 PM.
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Old 06-02-2018, 08:26 PM
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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.
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Old 06-02-2018, 09:45 PM
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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
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Old 06-03-2018, 01:05 AM
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Originally Posted by MadMan View Post
Chicago has been a high pressure sodium city for pretty much ever.
State Street for a while ran a few blocks of fluorescent. According to the internet it was all radio controlled.



Looks ridiculous if you ask me. That is four lamps per pole.
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Old 06-03-2018, 01:15 AM
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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.
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Old 06-03-2018, 01:37 AM
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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.
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Last edited by Telecolor 3007; 06-03-2018 at 01:44 AM.
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Old 06-03-2018, 05:14 PM
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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...
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Old 06-03-2018, 05:39 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MIPS View Post
State Street for a while ran a few blocks of fluorescent. According to the internet it was all radio controlled.



Looks ridiculous if you ask me. That is four lamps per pole.
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.
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Last edited by old_tv_nut; 06-03-2018 at 05:46 PM.
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Old 06-03-2018, 06:15 PM
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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.
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Last edited by Telecolor 3007; 06-03-2018 at 06:25 PM.
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Old 06-03-2018, 10:17 PM
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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.
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Old 06-04-2018, 02:13 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Telecolor 3007 View Post
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.
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.
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Old 06-04-2018, 03:16 PM
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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.
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