Hi, gang.  I'm hoping someone can help me with a photocontrol issue.

As many of you know, I'm big on repurposing old street lights for area lighting.  One of the things I've tried to do is replace some of the stock Fisher-Pierce photocontrols with Defiant "programmable" (part night) photo controls.  The concept seemed pretty cool since the Defiant PCs had adjustable pots for setting the nighttime go dark and relight periods.  I bought four of them and discovered I had real reliability problems.

One day burned.  One would go dark when I set it but wouldn't come on for the early morning interval.  I returned those and ended up with two more that won't go dark in the middle of the night no matter how they are set.  Oh yeah, I almost forgot that another one was assembled so poorly that the holes in the bottom plate didn't line up with the adjustment pots so it was impossible to set the time.  So I've returned 3 out of a total of seven and I'm going to return two more.  That's roughly a 71% failure rate.

Here's the unit I've been having trouble with and you can see that I left a pretty harsh review.

http://www.homedepot.com/p/Defiant-120-277-Volt-Programmable-Twist-Lock-Photocell-EZ-342C/204223610

Are any of you aware of a reliable brand of adjustable part-night photocontrols that you would recommend?

Thanks.

I don't know if that is really one of the issues here, but that is a kind of general remark, valid to all such smarter PC's:
These part time photocontrol units need some time of uninterrupted mains supply to synchronize the internal clock. They have signal LED designed to indicate if they had synchronized or not yet (it takes one full day/night cycle for that), but this tells only the basic synchronization. Still, the internal clock may be quite off, so when you set it to turn ON for some time in the morning, the inaccuracy in few hours may yield the internal clock do not reach the ON time before the dawn. It really needs multiple days to really accurately adjust the midnight/noon marks to the center of the night/day.

And this brings another thing: The accuracy of the time synchronization will be way more sensitive to any artificial light than just the ON/OFF functionality of the "dumb" PC's.