You may note that there are a
lot of "unknowns" in there. The main reason for that is that
the lamp you see here spent many years in a street light near here,
which had long, long since lost its weatherproofing rubber seal - as a
result half the lamp was immersed in water - the half which had
originally the stamp on it. So, I have no model number, no
date code, no nothing. Luckily I can tell from the tube
structure that it's an Osram product.
You may
also note that there's tape wrapped around the neck of this
lamp. The reason that's there is quite simple, and that
reason is that the outer envelope of this lamp is cracked.
Quite how that happened I have no idea, I know it happened in the
middle of the night, when the lamp was sitting on the desk in
here. I woke up at about four in the morning hearing this
"clinking" noise coming from the desk, I turned on the lights, went
over, and got there just in time to see the whole outer envelope part
company with the base about 10mm up from the clamp. I crudely
taped the thing back together so as to minimise the chances of the
inner tube becoming broken. I may clean it up and glue it
back together some day for the sake of cosmetics, then retake the
photographs.
Despite
having no vacuum in the outer jacket, the lamp does still operate, and
still manages about 85% of its full output, though it does never quite
run up fully now. Obviously, running like that is hard on the
lamp electrodes though, so it would probably have failed prematurely if
still in situ in this condition.
This was
one of three lamps which were my first low pressure sodium
examples. Rescued from an almost certain trip to a skip after
some SOX streetlights in a local village were replaced with fluorescent
versions (a bad thing I think). The workman there donated me
two fixtures and a random lamp (this one). Both fixtures
contained 35W SOX lamps, one nearly new, one expired. The
working SOX lamp is with a friend just now who has borrowed it to find
out whether an SO fixture outside his hotel works or not. I
shall add it here when it is returned.
If you
can tell me from the images here what the production date of this lamp
is, or can point me towards any details of its electrical
characteristics I would be most grateful. This is a
technology I'm still very much learning my way around!
|