Urbis Sapphire 1
Acquired September 2015
This lantern is one of my many internet purchases. It came from Chelmsford so imagine that is where it was installed but it's exact location is a mystery.
The Sapphire was well used by 'Highways England' in this area for main roads and briefly used by the council in late 2014 and early 2015 before they fell in favour of the L.E.D Thorn R2L2 and Urbis Axia. My example is just like the examples used by the council. It has the plastic canopy and a 60W CosmoPolis lamp of course though the councils examples do vary depending on their location. In fact the only difference between this and the council's is that mine is fitted with a miniature photocell where as the council's are fitted with a nema socket.
This lantern is one of my many internet purchases. It came from Chelmsford so imagine that is where it was installed but it's exact location is a mystery.
The Sapphire was well used by 'Highways England' in this area for main roads and briefly used by the council in late 2014 and early 2015 before they fell in favour of the L.E.D Thorn R2L2 and Urbis Axia. My example is just like the examples used by the council. It has the plastic canopy and a 60W CosmoPolis lamp of course though the councils examples do vary depending on their location. In fact the only difference between this and the council's is that mine is fitted with a miniature photocell where as the council's are fitted with a nema socket.
The Sapphire 1 is certainly a small lantern. Looking underneath really does beg the question, to any one who hasn't seen inside one of these, 'How is is it housing its gear?' when it is seen that the optical are takes up 3/4 of the underside and the column entry take the remaining 1/4.
Well this is how they did it. By installing the gear unit on a frame so it can be positioned diagonally between the reflector and the column entry.
The inside of the canopy is home to three things, a manufacturer label with the lantern specifications, a big yellow warning label and a Royce Thompson Microstar 2000 photocell.
This is the 60W lamp it was fitted in April 2014 according to the marker pen on its base
When the lamp is switched on the ballast gives off a very high frequency whistle for the duration of the lamp's warm up however when the lamp has reached full power the whistling stops and the light is silent. The light warms up really fast, the photo on the left was taken about 15 seconds after a cold start up and it was getting to bright to look at and full power was reached in around 80-90 seconds