In my area I’ve noticed several houses where commercial grade post top fixtures were being used in people’s yards.

There are a few GE Town and Country style fixtures at some houses… I’ve seen black ones and white ones, both HPS and MV.

There are a few houses in my neighborhood that have the GE space ship looking ones, I believe they’re all MV. One seems to have disappeared, and one sadly got the glass broken after hurricane Irma and got replaced with either an LED or CFL bucket light on a post top adapter.

There’s one house on the back way to the next town, and it has two GE Town and Country LED post tops on either side of the gate. There used to be a lot of wooden poles going down the driveway… it’s a very long driveway… and those had MH yardblasters on them.

That house sold a few months ago and I recently noticed all of those yardblasters got replaced with more GE post tops matching the ones at the gate! I was really surprised they would do that.

It must’ve cost a fortune? And where would the buy them? You can’t just order them at the home center or hardware store. lol

One of my neighbors a few doors down also has a black post top HPS fixture in their back yard by the lake… I haven’t seen it on in years though. Not sure how old it is, but it was likely installed by the previous owner or two. They used to also have an ITT cobra fixture somewhere in the yard… I remember it being put out for trash when I was a kid… I saw it riding my bike one day, of course my dad said “you are NOT taking that home.” 😂

Spoilsport...

😂

There are quite a lot of Town and Countrys by me also. Mainly white in color and MV. Don't know where they sourced them from, but it's cool.

I've seen some more rural properties with stuff like Sylvania/Powerlite Twistpaks or the RAB Thorn Gamma 6 clone. I think actual streetlights and yard lights are more common though. Even seen some gumballs and clamshells.


Most suburban homes have something like a standard incandescent/LED posttop instead. One in my neighbourhood has a HPS posttop in what looks like a standard residential fixture. Maybe he has a postline ballast.

 I installed this one : https://www.lighting-gallery.net/gallery/displayimage.php?album=5202&pos=288&pid=173786 by my neighbors fire pit/party area .  I found it on the side of the road still in the box where it had apparently fell off the back of a contractor's truck !

So it literally 'fell off the back of a lorry'... 

 I'd guess . 

There's a store called Princess Auto here that has a surplus stock section and they seem to get the most random things. I've seen stuff such as LED traffic signal modules, new LED cobraheads there and in the past they've even sold stuff like 175w MV GE Crimefighters, clamshells, gumballs, various other cobraheads.

Anyway I wonder if that's how most people with streetlights in their yard ended up with them, at least here.

last year got a 175 watt MV yard blaster and almost got a roadfocus small from them and they sold the crimefighters as NORMAL stock not surplus as I understand it

Yeah I remember hearing about Princess Auto.

Similar to that, seems like there was a utility grade LED fixture being sold here in the US by some retailer, but I can’t place who or which one.

Maybe the Cooper Caretaker?

The only commercial post top I saw on a house was a GE PM series post top that's painted black. Haven't seen it at night but it's been around (and still is) as long as I can remember.

@Cole D.: I have seen the Caretaker sold at an ACE Hardware. I think 29w 4000K for about 130 dollars and the refractor (sold separately) was either 20 or 30 dollars. Not sure if that ACE still sells them though.

Yeah I just checked and Ace does still sell it, although only one of the stores I see in my tri county area has it in stock. They have them on Amazon too.

caretaker yard lights are common at "proper" lighting supply shops in Canada and is the "barn light" replacement for the ubiquities "NIMA HEAD" styled HID yard blasters that was sold at every hardware store

I just remembered another house I went to one time. It was out in the country, set pretty far off the road. It had some more of those commercial type post type fixtures, in black. These were on tall poles though, about what height you’d see for a utility installation, whereas a lot of the HID post top-in-residential installs I see put them at a lower height.

I just looked up the place on Streetview, and these weren’t GE Town and Country, they look more like Cooper Traditionaire models.

The place didn’t look very old, I’d say late 2000s era or so, so probably HPS units.