100W S54 HPS American Electric Lighting Roadway 115 Street light

m very pleased to present my very first proper US North American streetlight in my collection :)

an American Electric Lighting Roadway 115 or AEL 115 for short (shown next to a Philips SL*18 lamp for size comparisons :) )

I have wanted a Proper US Cobrahead for many many years now and have tried a few times to get one over the years but which sadly never came to fruition, as you can imagine US streetlights are not easy to come by in the UK!

so I am very pleased after over 10 years of trying on and off to get one, I finally have one!

and I have to Thank FunkyLamp very who very kindly bought it as a gift for my birthday a couple weeks ago :) (it was listed on ebay for a good price with relatively cheap international shipping and he very kindly bought it for me while I was umming and ahhing about getting it myself as a birthday treat)

I have specifically wanted out of all the Cobrahead designs there are out there, one of the 113/115/25/327 design style as I like the general design/atheistic of those the best

so I am very pleased to get one finally :)

this particular example was new in box from the 22nd of August 2018, thankfully despite only being shipped in its original box without any extra packaging! (despite me asking the seller to double box it) it survived its trip to the UK with only some damage to the photo cell socket with everything else intact and functioning :)

it is one of AEL's "off the shelf" specifications and such is fitted with a standard US 120V S54 HPS choke ballast and ignitor for running US S54 100W HPS lamps, and thankfully has a drop refractor which I much prefer over FCO fixtures

it did not come with a lamp so I had to source a US 100W S54 lamp myself as I did not have any in the collection, but thankfully I was able to find a UK source for the lamp so I did not have to worry about importing one of those from the states :)

once the lamp had arrived I wired everything up and fired it up! of course this being a 120V 60Hz fixture means I had to not only step the voltage down from my mains voltage of 240V, but because the UK is 50Hz while the US is 60Hz, I had to compensate for that difference as well,

thankfully the gear being a simple choke ballast/inductor means I was able to compensate for the frequency difference by simply reducing the input voltage a bit in this case feeding it 105V from my Variac, made sure everything was in spec for 50Hz operation, and its been happily running on 105V 50Hz for the past couple days without any issues and everything as it an acceptable temperature and the lamp specs are running bang on :)

so yeah I am very happy with this addition to my collection and I have to thank funkylamp once more for getting it for me!

and I hope you found this interesting, perhaps somewhat mundane for US collectors, but very unusual in the UK! (and shows nicely that you can indeed run 60Hz choke ballasts in 50Hz land as long as you compensate for the difference by lowing the voltage a bit! do note that if you have a 60Hz CWA ballast or such like its a bit more complicated!, this method only works reliably on Choke type ballasts)


now does anyone know where one might find an AEL 327? that would be a dream come true for me! its such a shame they stopped making them a couple years ago as I would love to have been able save up and order one new myself! id love to get my hands on such a beast of a streetlight for my 700W-1000W Discharge lamps :)