Why would an entire road of HPS street lamps all leak? « on: January 03, 2020, 10:11:31 PM » Author: HPS_250
There was an entire, about 1 mile section of a road that I saw, lit by 250W HPS FCOS. Every single one of the lamps was leaked and blackened. Anyone know why this would happen?
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I’ve always been interested in all kinds of lighting, mainly incandescent and HID, and especially all kinds of sodium lamps (HPS/LPS). I’ll tolerate LED but I’m not a fan of it.
I’m not proud to say that my city has Devolved to LED.

	Re: Why would an entire road of HPS street lamps all leak? « Reply #2 on: January 03, 2020, 10:19:56 PM » Author: HPS_250
This area is on Highway 34 in Oxnard. It definitely doesn’t get very good maintenance, because I don’t think the lights are owned by SCE. Do you know if those are CalTrans? None of the SCE owned lights have leaked because they are very well maintained.
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I’ve always been interested in all kinds of lighting, mainly incandescent and HID, and especially all kinds of sodium lamps (HPS/LPS). I’ll tolerate LED but I’m not a fan of it.
I’m not proud to say that my city has Devolved to LED.

	Re: Why would an entire road of HPS street lamps all leak? « Reply #4 on: January 03, 2020, 10:33:21 PM » Author: HPS_250
I usually report cycling HPS lights to SCE (all of the lights in my area are still HPS) and they fix it within a week or replace it with a new M-400. Maybe the maintenance standards are different in my area though. These could be city owned lights, possibly owned by Oxnard. Does CalTrans maintain all traffic lights or does the city maintain some?
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I’ve always been interested in all kinds of lighting, mainly incandescent and HID, and especially all kinds of sodium lamps (HPS/LPS). I’ll tolerate LED but I’m not a fan of it.
I’m not proud to say that my city has Devolved to LED.

	Re: Why would an entire road of HPS street lamps all leak? « Reply #6 on: January 06, 2020, 01:02:30 PM » Author: Medved
Quote from: HPS_250 on January 03, 2020, 10:11:31 PM There was an entire, about 1 mile section of a road that I saw, lit by 250W HPS FCOS. Every single one of the lamps was leaked and blackened. Anyone know why this would happen? It could be a deffective batch of lamps used in the last group relamping. Or these use a ballast not compensating tahat much for mains variation and there is a long term overvoltage (wrong setting on a transformer), running the lamps too hot.
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	Re: Why would an entire road of HPS street lamps all leak? « Reply #7 on: January 06, 2020, 06:23:40 PM » Author: HPS_250
There could possibly be overvoltage from a bad transformer, (these are right near a substation).
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I’ve always been interested in all kinds of lighting, mainly incandescent and HID, and especially all kinds of sodium lamps (HPS/LPS). I’ll tolerate LED but I’m not a fan of it.
I’m not proud to say that my city has Devolved to LED.

	Re: Why would an entire road of HPS street lamps all leak? « Reply #8 on: January 06, 2020, 07:30:06 PM » Author: HPS_250
These are in Oxnard CA, so weather like lightning strikes and thunderstorms are uncommon. Lightning did strike a few times about a month ago there though, according to Accuweather. These had good photocells because they weren’t dayburning, but I don’t know about the condition of the capacitors and igniters.
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I’ve always been interested in all kinds of lighting, mainly incandescent and HID, and especially all kinds of sodium lamps (HPS/LPS). I’ll tolerate LED but I’m not a fan of it.
I’m not proud to say that my city has Devolved to LED.

	Re: Why would an entire road of HPS street lamps all leak? « Reply #9 on: January 06, 2020, 07:36:28 PM » Author: HPS_250
They are all the same GE M-400s, so there were probably installed at the same time and then group relamped later.
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I’ve always been interested in all kinds of lighting, mainly incandescent and HID, and especially all kinds of sodium lamps (HPS/LPS). I’ll tolerate LED but I’m not a fan of it.
I’m not proud to say that my city has Devolved to LED.

	Re: Why would an entire road of HPS street lamps all leak? « Reply #10 on: January 07, 2020, 04:17:25 AM » Author: Medved
Leak failure can not come from short term really excessive overvoltage (like a HV line falling onto a LV one feeding the lanterns), that would destroy the ballast and other components in the first place. If it were an overvoltage, it would have to be a mild (so the ballast and installation survived), but long term one (long term lamp stress caused them to run hotter than designed so after some time failed early).
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	Re: Why would an entire road of HPS street lamps all leak? « Reply #11 on: January 07, 2020, 10:15:26 AM » Author: HPS_250
I have literally everything in my house on a 2000 joule surge protector, so I haven’t had anything fail. I did recently have some power strips fail from a lightning strike, though. Where did CalTrans sell thier HPS FCOS?
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I’ve always been interested in all kinds of lighting, mainly incandescent and HID, and especially all kinds of sodium lamps (HPS/LPS). I’ll tolerate LED but I’m not a fan of it.
I’m not proud to say that my city has Devolved to LED.

	Re: Why would an entire road of HPS street lamps all leak? « Reply #12 on: January 07, 2020, 11:27:05 AM » Author: Medved
HV line falling onto anything causes mainly an overcurrent on the HV line itself, so the protection there should trip within some seconds. That would be sufficient to blow some wires, to blow electronic, photocells (and no, MOVs wont help there), but not tho have the arctubes overheat and leak. But if there would be e.g. 140V instead of 120V so some 50% overload on the lamps, that would likely lead to leaking arctubes after some months.
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	Re: Why would an entire road of HPS street lamps all leak? « Reply #13 on: January 08, 2020, 02:48:00 AM » Author: Medved
But the ballast damage wont be so uniform (giving the same degree of overload) for all lamps failing the same way at the same time. That makes me thinking the ballasts were good, at least that time. Because only that would make them consistent.
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	Re: Why would an entire road of HPS street lamps all leak? « Reply #14 on: January 08, 2020, 04:11:22 PM » Author: Medved
I too think the deffective batch of lamps is the most likely cause. Simply because an overvoltage (long term) severe enough to cause significant lamp problems would stress the ballasts too or the same long time and that would have consequences in their reliability as well, however it is still a possible scenario (the lanterns may happen to be designed so the ballasts are well cooled so able to handle the overload well)... Plus many lamp models when overloaded just start to cycle way before actually failing and that would prompt the service way sooner (a lot of complaints - when the whole street starts cycling, it wont be "shoveled under the carpet"...).
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