I had a set of parking lot lights, mounted on a bullhorn with 2 high pressure sodium (HPS) lights with color corrected bulbs to bring to a cool white color. This color was ideal for winter time lighting of the pond for ice skating rather than the sick yellow color of HPS. I had one fixture (or bulb?) go bad and it costs a bit to rent a lift to go up there and check it out.
I decided to not risk replacing a bulb and find out ballast was bad etc, so I prepared to retrofit to LED fixtures. The LED fixtures are cheaper all the time, have better waterproofing in the housing and glass than my current old HPS ones and the obvious savings with running cost. The HPS have a big current draw at startup and I have a long electrical run from my house to the pond. You can't cycle them on/off quickly.
The LEDs are much nicer for snapping on and turning off to take a quick peak what is happening down there with ice conditions, snow, etc.
I upgraded from 400w HPS to 500W LED and am very happy with the result. The spread of light from LED is 180 degrees wide so you lose the directional nature of the HPS. I would say the LEDs can't 'throw the light' as far or it seems that you lose ability to saturate with light intensity as you get out at distance, but for the cost it was worth it.
I had to modify a bracket to slip over the bullhorn and to fasten to the LED light housing but I highly recommend looking into it. The fixtures come in a variety of Watts and I went with the blue/white light (cold) but you can get a warm yellow flood light if you prefer.
The older fixtures have 2-4 very large single emitting LEDs, either 50W x 2 or 50x4 or even 100W single emitting LED panel x2 or 100w x4.
New fixtures have SMD or multiple small led emitters all lined up in a panel. I tried both kinds and the SMD are definitely the way to go.
Ebay has a few US sellers (I bought from NJ seller) making it easier to correspond and do returns if needed, they are all chinese made though.
If figure with better weather seal and life expectancy at about 50,000 hours I hope to never have to rent that lift and try to position it in the woods and safely go up and down in the dark to install and position those lights again.
At their current price point, you get a whole new fixture for the price of a replacement bulb for those factory metal halide or HPS fixtures. If you had a girder structure for easy mounting you could easily just swap out to new fixtures rather than retrofit existing fixtures with LED bulbs. My lights came in 110V but I believe their transformers handle 110-220V
They make motion activated fixtures too and pricing is getting ridiculously cheap. I see if you buy 10 each of the 100W motion activated fixtures they are $17.99 each!
One option for LED fixtures
