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PostPosted: Tue Oct 05, 2010 10:39 pm 
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Oliver Hennessy wrote:
Some new Urbis Evolo installations have been installed as a trial by the looks of things in a residential area of Grantham. Very nice looking installations I have to say, though they did replace some Beta 5's and Stanton and Staveley columns.


Indeed, the Evolos are stylish lanterns; preferably when mounted post-top with minicells.

sotonsteve wrote:
Birmingham's Street Lighting PFI will use WRTL Stelas in residential areas and WRTL Airtraces on main roads.


I'm really not a fan of purpose-built LED lanterns. Sure the Stelas do a wonderful job at lighting, but in terms of aesthetics, I would much rather see a functional lantern in disguise, such as the Mini-Iridium LED.

mazeteam wrote:
1980's had Low Pressure Sodium (mainly SOX)


Wasn't LPS very dominant in the 1970s or would you say the 1980s is when it became far more apparent?


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PostPosted: Tue Oct 05, 2010 10:57 pm 
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The energy crisis of the 1970's saw mercury and remaining fluorescent start to be removed in favour of SOX, but the mass replacements were still going on by the end of the decade (from what I can glean from stuff I've read) and so SOX didn't really take firm hold until the 80's.

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PostPosted: Wed Oct 06, 2010 10:40 pm 
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mazeteam wrote:
As I see it, each decade has it's main source of street lighting that grew to be more dominant than other light sources.
1960's had MCF fluorescent
1970's had Mercury Vapour in various forms
1980's had Low Pressure Sodium (mainly SOX)
1990's had High Pressure Sodium
so using this, the 2000's should have had another light source such as Metal Halide, and yet now we're going into the 2010's and still SON is being installed as though it's 'cutting edge'.

I must admit I do like it here in Essex:

1950s was MBF (picture shows GEC Z5641s in Jubilee Avenue, Clacton-on-Sea)
1960s was MBF
1970s was SOX
1980s was SOX
1990s was SOX
2000s was SOX
2010s, 2020s, 2030s and 2040s will be SON? (actually, I don't like the sound of that!)

Mercifully, much of the MBF installed in the 1950s and 1960s still survives to this day, alongside everything that has been installed since then. The shift away from installing new SOX in favour of SON, as hinted at in that newspaper article, was confirmed this year: my contact is now unable to order new Philips SRS201s and XGS103s/104s and must now install Philips SON SGS203s and Phosco P567s in the place of knockdowns, even in exclusively SOX-lit street (which are still in the vast majority).


Last edited by David on Mon Oct 09, 2017 4:42 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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PostPosted: Wed Oct 06, 2010 11:18 pm 
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I really hope that SON will eventually become obslete (somewhere around 2016 - 2018) and be replaced with more eye freindly MH or in more built up areas CFL or PL-T / PL-L. In Lincoln the city is lit by SON lamps still but in some areas they're lit by MH. I think there is still a bit of Lincoln which is still lit by SOX but I am having to think back to the 5th of December last year since I went.

In Matlock its a mixture SOX in the town but SON on the A6 bypassing. Buxton Market Place is lit by SON but walking for half a mile revels that SOX is still used.

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PostPosted: Wed Oct 06, 2010 11:28 pm 
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Well whoever came up with the data for the report doesn't know what they're talking about... SON lighting won't create any less light pollution than SOX - because invariably a 35w or a 55w SOX will be replaced with 70w SON. On a column of 5m or less then the area directly below the lantern will be overlit and the light will bounce back up into the sky. In an ideal world, a basic principle of basic lighting layout design would be applied - that of 'more lights of lower power are better than less lights of higher power'... and you can prove this true even in your own back garden by comparing the light output of a single 500w halogen mounted just above your ground floor windows in comparison to 10 outdoor spotlights running 3w LED lamps or similar.
Bring this scale up to that of a street, and if you have closer spaced columns running 26w fluorescent (or 24w PL-L inside a WRTL 2600 for example) then you will get a much better and nicer/cleaner light than having 70w SON in full cutoff lanterns at existing column spacing.

The main thing I don't like with SON is that the colour rendering is poor in relation to its power consumption - it makes everywhere feel like an army barracks at night, and isn't particularly easy on the eye when in a moving vehicle. If a place installs metal halide lanterns, then they should either be Cosmo or G12 metal halide capsule type lanterns - because if lanterns with screw lampholders are used then at some point somebody will come along and stick a SON lamp in it and ruin everything.

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PostPosted: Thu Oct 07, 2010 2:14 pm 
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David wrote:
1960s was MBF
1970s was SOX
1980s was SOX
1990s was SOX
2000s was SOX
2010s, 2020s, 2030s and 2040s will be SON? (actually, I don't like the sound of that!)

Mercifully, much of the MBF installed in the 1950s and 1960s still survives to this day, alongside everything that has been installed since then. The shift away from installing new SOX in favour of SON, as hinted at in that newspaper article, was confirmed this year: my contact is now unable to order new Philips SRS201s and XGS103s/104s and must now install Philips SON SGS203s and Phosco P567s in the place of knockdowns, even in exclusively SOX-lit street (which are still in the vast majority).


Excellent way of illustrating it, David. This is what I like about Essex (and Herts) - the LPS was still going strong. I'm surprised the replacement lanterns are not of the modern post-2000 variety...the SGS203s are now old technology however cheap they may be. Additionally, mixing HPS into LPS streets is an outrage and something my borough council started doing in 2004 up until when the PFI started in 2006 in which they started using spare LPS lanterns again.

The article complains about light pollution, but we know the argument from Phil MacBean's site that LPS actually is better for astronomers. It is a shame they don't produce full cut-off SOX lanterns anymore, as it would have made Essex's argument about HPS's ability to be shielded irrelevant!

Anyways - apologies for going off-topic!


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PostPosted: Thu Oct 07, 2010 2:39 pm 
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Alex wrote:
The article complains about light pollution, but we know the argument from Phil MacBean's site that LPS actually is better for astronomers. It is a shame they don't produce full cut-off SOX lanterns anymore, as it would have made Essex's argument about HPS's ability to be shielded irrelevant!


The SRS201 (MA range) and Residium can be made full cut-off for SOX lamps.


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PostPosted: Thu Oct 07, 2010 4:01 pm 
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Lampman wrote:
Alex wrote:
The article complains about light pollution, but we know the argument from Phil MacBean's site that LPS actually is better for astronomers. It is a shame they don't produce full cut-off SOX lanterns anymore, as it would have made Essex's argument about HPS's ability to be shielded irrelevant!


The SRS201 (MA range) and Residium can be made full cut-off for SOX lamps.


Really? I'm yet to see any examples. I will admit though that the Residium does have very good optics and the lamp is actually held more under the canopy than in the bowl like in the case of the SRS201.


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PostPosted: Thu Oct 07, 2010 5:37 pm 
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The SRS201 can be adjusted i.e. the lamp holder can be moved so it is further up in the canopy which classifies as full cut-off however most seem to be left as semi cut-off.


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PostPosted: Sun Oct 24, 2010 3:24 pm 
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Apologies again for another off-topic reply!

Alex wrote:
Additionally, mixing HPS into LPS streets is an outrage and something my borough council started doing in 2004 up until when the PFI started in 2006 in which they started using spare LPS lanterns again.

I must admit that Essex's decision to install SON even for casual replacements is probably not as bad as it sounds. For a start, the colour of SON seems to be much more 'yellow' these days compared to about 30 years ago, when they were almost pink, so where the first few SON P567s and SGS203s have appeared in previously SOX-lit streets, the change in colour is not as stark as it would have been if Essex had decided to move over to white light instead.

In fact the difference in colour is not as stark as the last time Essex decided to change light sources; from MBF to SOX in the 1970s. Almost 40 years later, and the slow-paced change from MBF to SOX in Clacton was around two-thirds complete before this new change over to SON.

Alex wrote:
I'm surprised the replacement lanterns are not of the modern post-2000 variety...the SGS203s are now old technology however cheap they may be.

I'm guessing Essex has always been 'behind the curve' when it comes to innovations in street lighting! In the 1990s and 2000s, the most widely-installed lanterns by a country mile were Philips XGS103/XGS104s and SRS201s, both arguably old technology in both of those decades and definitely in the latter. In fact their stubbornness with the XGS103/XGS104s and SRS201s for the last two decades has actually returned lantern uniformity into streets which hadn't seen such lantern uniformity since the original lighting was installed in the 1950s and 1960s! In those small pockets where Essex has installed SON in the past, they have gone for the '203 on both main roads and side roads, so I'm not too surprised that Essex think that installing SGS203s in SOX-lit main roads will eventually result in lantern uniformity in, say, 20 years from now!


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