Nice mod and definitely gives a good output in the night shot

I think I’ve asked you this before?, but are your 70 watt driveway lights still in operation? I think out of all the lanterns I’ve bought of James, this is my favourite, it’s nice to have it in service!

They sure are, 4 coach lanterns and 2 wall packs, timer and photocell controlled dusk to 10pm from September to late April each year. Agreed the Arc are good still fitting them in SON here as casual A4 SOX replacements

Nice!, I’ve got two lanterns and two coach lights running dusk till dawn on a Sangamo S251 time switch and contactor, the old school UK street lighting way! , I am proper please with this in here, I didn’t expect it to light the garden so well, at this height, for 1200 lumens!, I was thinking to Mark (FrontSideBus), on LG, and he made a good point, 20 years ago if any of us lighting people would have seen something like this, we’d have ripped shreds out of it! , but I wouldn’t have guessed a household CFL would have lit an area so well!

Optics of the Arc definitely helping get the max lumens out from the lamp agreed 20 years ago it'd have to be HID, shows how far domestic lamps have evolved from pre mass CFL era, most of us probably weren't a fan of CFL initially being electronic ballasted

Rich 50W SON on an electronic ballast would be well cool and seriously cost fuck all to run.

Yeah, but seeing this at just 1200 lumens, (I stood outside last night at 11:30 having a brew), and the whole garden was really nicely lit up without being over lit!, I’m not sure it needs 4000 lumens out of the Arc?

Yesssss it does need it! My back garden doesn’t need 150W SON power but it gets it! Since 3/5/21 I have had a power monitor on the pole mounted part night 45W cosmo since that date on all night every night it’s used 190kwh even at rip off 50p kWh that’s only £95 for 2 years running but that being said electric is coming back down again now sharpishly. £40 odd for 2 years at 20p Kwh. A price I would be well willing to pay….. or not…. More info to follow soon.

Well, its hard to explain?, my whole ethos has changed to lighting matters!, light at night is unnatural, (i.e it’s man made), so we can see in the dark. Now, if you’re in a pitch black setting, and you light up something like a 15 watt Pygmy, you have light!, you can see!, it doesn’t have to be bright?, for years I’ve overlit my garden, 26,000 lumens out of a SON-E is a prime example!, too excessive for the space!

And over the years I’ve shut down this excessiveness from 26,000 lumens to 15,000, 12,000, 6300, 6000, 1800, 1521 and now presently to 1200, and it’s still adequately lit now without it being too much! I could in theory even drop down to a 14 watt Genie at just 800 lumens AND still be able to see at night! Then theres SON lamps?, these have now (believe it or not), become boring to me, they last too long!, yes they have interesting starts, but realistically how many times do you actually get to see your HID set up start?, unless you stand under it every night like some sort of weirdo , waiting for it to fire up, you don’t normally see every start!

Then there’s life?, I like relamping my outside lighting, but if you’ve got SON that could do 10 years in service, your not going to be able to put new lamps in frequently?, and for a 10 year service life, you may as well use LED! With most CFL having 10,000 hours, that’s just over 2 years service, with the bonus of warm white light, their fluorescent, and you technically get a new set of gear and a new tube on every relamp!

Yes yes I do get that, I like fucking around with my stuff too. I guess I have so much of it now there is always something to mess with. I wish for instance that the 70W SW on my home would die so that can go back to SON, but that’s going to be running a ventrue HO lamp lol

That’s exactly the problem, we all have too much stuff!, it would be nice if we had your space outside, then installed one of each type of lamp we had in different locations? Is this what your idea is with the solar installation?