I've used 2 bulkhead 70W white sodium discharge lights at work in the yard and they're cheap to run and effective. I'm, now considering mounting a pair back to back on a telescopic frame as portable worklights to run off a generator. This is to replace ordinary halogen floodlights which don't last very well in the environment.
Are these SONs prone to damage by vibration or shocks when being moved? Especially when lit?
AJH
Is run-up time not an issue on those?
NT
Not in this case as they tend to stay on all night shift (12 hours at this time of year) but get moved around on a trolley or in the back of a transit truck.
The 110V halogen floodlights seldom survive 3 shifts and I'm think it is jolts or vibration that breaks the filaments.
The alternative is many 55W 12V headlights or these 2 bulkhead SONs back to back if I can find 110V bulbs to fit.
AJH
I am no expert and may not be up with the times, but had always thought SON/sodium gave an orange light. We use quite a few SON & metal halide lamps from 70-1000w. These are mainly static but some are on portable lighting towers, either diesel generator or mains powered They do not take kindly to movement whilst hot, ie. lit.
Nick.
High Pressure Sodium are white.
Shock mount the brackets with M5-to-M5 or M6-to-M6 rubber stud-to-stud mounts? That way the simple bumps are reduce to lower peak G of longer duration. You would need to pilot on one stand and see if it makes any difference.
Car 12V spot lights would handle vibration, but that creates a problem of cabling looms, connectors, fusing, power supply and so on (by the time you have built an invertor and so on the cost saving is probably gone and the lights aren't free either).
Check what Marquee people use?
Thought it was:
Low pressure sodium - more or less monochromatic orange. High pressure sodium - White'ish but with still an orange tinge. Mercury - Whiter than HP Na but with a blue/green tinge.
I have noticed a few pretty white street lights recently, in places where HP Na still exist. Is this "white" light a new version?
There is a farm about 2 miles away across the valley abd below us that has recently fitted some very bright and white lights on the end of barn. They really catch your eye up here, I must call in and ask if they can fit a shade/reflector to them. The light we are seeing isn't doing them any good and is just annoying us.
SON in my experience do not particularly like being moved when hot but are better than halogen by a long way. The housings are sometimes rather weak with ballasts held in place by a couple of small screws so prone to self destruction if being moved on a vehicle or trailer.
A few years back I had some Ecoflood CFL lamps fitted to the outside of a warehouse in Watford and have to say the amount of light they gave out was surprisingly high. There is a more powerful version shown at
Could they be LED street lights?
Metal halide. Very close to tungsten in appearance. We had a street lamp replacement scheme round here a year or two back. The lamps are much nicer with less spill upwards, but the lamp fitter from teh company that maintains them doesn't like them so fits sodium lamps when they fail. We now have an odd mixture.
The same ballasts do for both.
SON is the name given to the high pressure ones with mercury and sodium. They give a white light which enables one to distinguish colour, important in this case. The white is partally caused by a doppler shift in the normal orange sodium spectral line because the sodium ions are travelling faster under the higher pressure IIRC.
That's what I needed to know, do you have any general advice when used with a tower?
AJH
This is what I have done with a SON bulkhead, they're triggered by a separate street light (again SON) with its own solar cell plus I have a timer that switches them off when no one is around. I'm considering how to override this. There are still several PIR floodlights for security purposes.
I do worry a bit about light pollution but the general manager insists on one SON being on constantly during darkness.
AJH
I guess from the feedback its time to think about mounting them on suspension.
Re 110v operation, that's not achieved by fitting 110v sodium bulbs, but by using a 110v sodium ballast
NT
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like:
More like - he/they have an extensive stock of old sodium bulbs.
Metal halide come on a very wide range of qualities and colour temperatures. There's Warm White at about 3000K, and at the other end, I have a 20,000K one (designed for lighting corals and tropical fish, and it also worked very nicely for lighting up my snowy garden, but these very high colour temperature ones generate too much ozone to use indoors IMO).
I'm not aware of any such. There are SON lamps manufactured to run on Mercury Vapour lamp ballasts (or were - wouldn't surprise me if that line no longer existed).
Having said that, there are a number of mis-matched HID ballast/lamp combinations which do appear to work OK, although no manufacturer will support them and you probably get bum results on efficiency and life.
The other thing is that in this country, we've had quite a selection of SON lamp colours available to choose from. For some reason, this has not been the case elsewhere, and in particular, some of the colour variants used here will not run at all on US control gear.
Added sci.engr.lighting
Not specialist subject but certainly is couple of peoples on lighting.
Seen LiteAll towers on railway works that looked like white SON on couple of 4 way towers did credible impression of daylight over the area.
For full coverage, light trespass mightr be an issue, actually pretty efficient at 100kW, SoftSun
140W cheap to run? The LP Sodium lamps are usually 9W aren't they?
Lowest used for streetlighting is 35W AFAIK. There's an 18W one which was used in some SOX wall-mount bulkheads. I don't recall seeing a 9W one. Philips used to do a laboratory one of around 3-5W as part of their lab discharge lighting set. The low powered SOX lamps are nowhere near as efficient as the high powered ones - the 180W is the largest and most efficient. I suspect that by the time you're down to 9W, a fluorescent is significantly more efficient. (Probably true for the 18W one too when compared with modern compact fluorescents.)
The number of low pressure sodium lamps in use is falling fast, as local councils are removing them in streetlighting replacement schemes, and they stopped installing new ones 20+ years ago. It is unlikely there will be sufficient demand to justify manufacture of these very far into the future. Does seem rather bizzare given the current trend for energy efficiency, to be getting rid of the most efficient lighting source invented.
In article , Andrew Gabriel writes
We use 70W SON and 70W Metal Halide in the Church. They replaced a large number of 300/500W halogen floods.
The maths work out at 10 x 400W (average of the two bulb sizes in the floods) = 4kW. Replaced by 9 x 70W lamps (which give better illumination) = 630W
Saving per church service about 7kWh - makes the Treasurer a bit happier (especially when I picked up some spare Metal Halide bulbs for 99p on ebay!)
This is much the same calculation I did, except we had 5 or 6 halogens and the bulbs didn't last long (all cheap 500W PIR controlled).
I have replaced them with 1 70W SON on permanently till I switch it off when I get to work, 1 70W lamp post SON triggering 2 38W and 2 15 W fluorescent bulkheads (which light a passageway) via its photocell and one 70W SON with a solar cell and a timer. This costs less than 50p/day which is reasonable for the convenience of people moving around the car park/yard.
I've cabled the yard lights with 4 core swa, with the intent, eventually, of having the white light XOR infra red lighting for the security cameras once I fit 3 more lamp posts. I origanally planned for 5 lamp posts and 2 bulkhead SONs plus fluorescents with emergency batteries but since having the 3 SONs I'm asking to reduce the total because performance is better than expected.
AJH
Added sci.engr.lighting
Not specialist subject but certainly is couple of peoples on lighting.
Seen LiteAll towers on railway works that looked like white SON on couple of 4 way towers did credible impression of daylight over the area.
For full coverage, light trespass mightr be an issue, actually pretty efficient at 100kW, SoftSun
In other words, SON lamps can take a lot of knocking around without problems. They're widely used for outdoor lighting on tall poles, bridge structures, traveling cranes and other moving equipment.
But SON lamps are sensitive to voltage drop. If your generator supplies a relatively constant voltage (within 10% of nominal rated), all will be well. If there are voltage dips, the SON lamps will go out and then there will be a delay of 3-5 minutes while the lamps cool, restart and warm up to full output again.
Terry McGowan
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