Now that my beloved hometown of Sunrise FL has finally made the decision to replace all of the HPS lights throughout the city with LED I had to ask the question.

I've noticed that HPS really isn't discussed here so I'm just wondering how everyone else feels about HPS??

For me MV is the only HID light that I truly enjoy.
With HPS I've learned to accept it and admittedly for street lighting it's probably the best way to go.
It's efficient and incredibly reliable.
Also it is usually easily repaired.
I learned from my power company, FPL, that aside from lamps it's usually the ignitor that causes a problem and that's a simple fix.

I agree with you as MV is also my favorite  . HPS here seems to be a double edged sword . Back in the early days of LG  , HPS was what LED is today , the destroyer of classic lighting ! If you look at some of the old photos and comments regarding HPS , they're are almost exactly the same rants you now see with LED , just a different color .

I like HPS simply because I grew up around it. Being able to watch them warm up and change colors I always thought was fascinating when I was very little. I remember at the first house I lived in back in the early 2000s, there was a M-250R1 that was 70 watt HPS that could be seen warming up from sitting in the backyard. That’s how my interest in street lighting first began. Once I knew HID was on its way out I began collecting them.
 

Like Econolite03, I like HPS because I grew up with it as well. I love MV lights but haven’t seen many aside from yard lights.

Too bad SCE doesn’t repair the lights they have, they typically change them out if they have a problem other than a lamp or PC.

Yeah, I remember during my early days on LG HPS was regarded like LED is now as the destroyer of classic MV luminaires and it's colour being described as "yucky radioactive yellow" compared to the MV they replaced. Now it seems HPS is viewed in a much better light.

The same attitude was held towards T8 fluorescent too, often rants about how they look worse than T12 and pictures of badly done T8 retrofits were full of rants.

Over here MV was replaced early on in the 90s so there really wasn't much MV left by the time I started collecting. First HPS installs were in '67 with some utilities install only HPS by the late 70s. The only real stronghold of MV seemed to be indoor recessed lighting. For some reason those were being installed as MV even into the 90s here so a lot of them lasted into the LED era.

Anyway, I do collect HPS stuff but as a way of preserving what was once a common streetlighting source. In terms of usage, I prefer using MV and CMH lights myself. In fact I used to pass on HPS stuff at the Restore in favour of getting MV and MH stuff. That being said, HPS does seem to work fairly well for it's intended use as streetlighting on higher speed suburban roads and freeways. Especially in inclement weather.

 Joseph, I'm sure that comment deserves a groan... Now it seems HPS is viewed in a much better light.  

Personally Sodium lighting, preferably LPS, for me is essential for being able to see clearly at night as I suffer from night blindness, so anything that is at the 'peak sensitivity' of night vision means I can't see worth a damn. 

I have noticed since being a member here that sodium lighting, be it LPS or HPS, never took off in the US to the same extent as it did here. There, MV always seemed to be the preferred light source.

Here, it was probably the other way around. For residential streets, and minor roads, mercury was used quite a lot; the estate where my mother lived, and where I spent many years, was lit by 80W MV post tops, and there was one right outside my bedroom window, I deeply regret never having taken a photo of it 

But like everywhere else, it got "upgraded" and the area was never the same again.

For major roads and motorways, LPS ruled supreme. In fact, the first ever motorway lighting of all in the UK was installed on the M1 between London and Luton in 1971, and consisted of no less than 1200 140W linear sodium lamps   

Later, SOX was used extensively, and there are still some sections of motorways lit by them, mostly around the outer London area, which we were both surprised and very pleased to encounter on our last trip there.

Personally, I have always preferred LPS, a 45W SOI/H was the first sodium lamp I ever collected, and I still have it to this day. It is now almost EOL, but still lights valiantly, or it did the last time I tried it, I think now that we have a NOS example of the same type of lamp, it will be put into retirement and displayed

HPS..? Yes, I like it, it's not quite the same as low pressure sodium, but it's still sodium, and although colour temperatures and shades vary far more than they do with LPS, they are still very pleasant to me, especially when out and driving. We have lots of HPS lamps, one I like a lot was received not long ago in a trade with Patrick, and you can see the wonderful amber/gold glow from it.

I grew up with HPS and I love it! The orange color looks so cool and ambient on the roadways. Sad to see my childhood lights disappearing throughout.

We always strive for the things that no longer exist... it's called nostalgia.

I have always said that I love Low Pressure Sodium, Mercury Vapor, T12 Fluorescent, and Incandescent. This was largely because of the fascinating principals behind those technologies, but that analogy could be just as easily said for all HID sources namely MH and HPS.
The reason I didn't include them in the above list was because they were so common everywhere and didn't give off that "far away, lost aesthetic" that relatively uncommon lamps did for me. Most of the lighting aesthetic and enjoyment for old technology is brought about by having something and reproducing a scene that basically "doesn't exist" anymore. It's really cool to be able to reproduce live scenes of the past.

Today however, with HID lamps like HPS in rapid decline, that feeling of nostalgia I originally exclusively felt when looking at those four light sources comes around when I see some HPS installs (if that makes sense). Basically, now that HPS has gone from everywhere to virtually nonexistent in my area over a couple months, I now feel nostalgic for some HPS scenes. No where near on the scale of MV, LPS, T12, and GLS, but it's still there none the less. I imagine this feeling will get greater as years go by and I'm sure many members here who have grown up with HPS and now see it gone will gradually start to feel the same. Basically, we take things with a grain of salt when they are common, but when they start to disappear we desperately want them back.

That's my opinion on this whole topic at least... hopefully I made sense!

@subway5411 - Hey, you make as much sense as anybody else in this madhouse 

I agree, now I'm getting older, I miss the things I knew and loved in my childhood, I think we all do to some extent. Lighting-wise, I've always loved LPS the most; a 45W SOI/H was one of the first discharge lamps I ever collected when I was but a very annoying small person, pestering the life out of engineers repairing or replacing lamps, that's how I got the SOI/H, complete with ballast 

Now I'm a very annoying much older and larger person, but around here they tend to come and replace lights at silly o'clock when I'm asleep (in other words, mornings  ) so I don't tend to see them these days. 99.9% of the decent lighting in the city here is all gone now, anyway 

I do like HPS, although I guess it could be nostalgia for me too. I have always liked the warm orange glow, seeing HPS NEMA security lights in yards, or cobra heads on roads. Since growing up that's what I remember the most. I don't remember MV being around much by then, and it was mostly relegated to applications such as yard blasters by then. So MV was around, but HPS was much more common.

HPS is still actually quite common in my area for roadway lighting. I'd say it's 60-40 with HPS vs LED. MV is around but still mostly residential yard blaster type lighting or on some commercial buildings, and a few roadway lights. MH is still fairly common on buildings and for parking lots.

My first introduction to HPS was many, many years before we had it in street lighting, it was in the form of 32 x 250 watt HPS lowbays in our school sports hall!
I’d even say they were quite scary during assembly’s when they used to cycle!, (of course I didn’t know what they were back then)!, it wasn’t until I was 15 and just about to leave school when I first saw one first hand and learned what type of lamp they actually were!
It was a bit bitter sweet with the street lighting side of them as we lost our GEC Z9517s with linear sodium lamps in along Booth Lane to HPS in around 1985, and this was the first ever mass installation of them in our town back then.

Yeah, I guess part of the reason why I warmed up to HPS (another bad pun  ) in recent years is because they starting to remove them. Right now in my area, Toronto is the only municipality that still has a lot of HPS. Some others are around 25 LED/75 HPS, or HPS only at signal poles.

A far cry from 2009 when 90% of the streetlights around the Toronto area were HPS. MV streetlighting never stuck around in my area like in did in some parts of the US for some reason. After the early 90s MV was pretty much mass replaced with HPS here.

Honestly I like all HID sources, even electronic CMH which I always considered to be the pinnacle of HID has it's charm at times.