Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
LED street lights coming to Haringey?
I noticed this on Lynne Featherstone's website yesterday:
"The Haringey Liberal Democrats, for instance, have put together a fully-costed plan to replace Haringey’s old street lighting with new energy efficient LED street lights.
As well as reducing the Council’s electricity bills and helping the environment through lower electricity usage, the new lights will help to reduce crime and the fear of crime by making our streets brighter at night."
It may have passed me by had I not watched the BBC London News the previous evening, where I saw this report.
I applaud forward thinking in energy and cost saving, but I just hope that the relevant tests are done to ensure we don't end up with an unhappy situation if it all goes ahead.
This is in no way a political post. Just thought it interesting :)
Tags for Forum Posts: led lights, street lighting
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by 2h042tmwz9cag on
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Non-LED lighting can be dimmed. Dimming is not exclusive to LED technology. As for maintenance, a sodium bulb costs a fiver, an LED driver £100 and a new array £100+. All stuff that the LED propaganda merchants don't want anyone to know.
Then there's the health and environmental issues relating to the excessive blue light that LEDs have to be tuned to in order to be more energy efficient than sodium. They don't want anyone to know about that either
Jusy Google: LED street lighting / health concerns / environmental concerns.
LED street lights are eco-friendly? Don't make me laugh ............
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Permalink Reply by Vernon on
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How about getting rid of street lamps altogether and making it compulsory to wear head torches at night?
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There have been many changes in street lighting over the last 10 - 15 year, from Sodium SOX, Deep Orange, then Sodium SON, Light Orange, more recently Metal Halide, White, and on an experimental basis, LED, Blueish White.
The most common now are SON Sodium and Metal Halide, although many streets still have SOX Sodium. Near to me, many columns have been changed most recently over the last three years with Halide, but previously many High Pressure Sodium lamps were used with the light orange colour.
I have only seen one street with LED Luminaires, that is Dickenson Road, N8. Part of the street is in Islington, but it previously had Haringey's Cast Standards, with SOX Luminaires, and most of it is in Haringey. The interesting thing is that when old SOX columns are replaced by SON or metal halide lamps, new posts are installed and they are closer together for better light distribution and pedestrian safety. But in Dickenson Road they have put new, slightly higher columns with the LED lanterns but at the existing column locations. They are carefully designed and do the job well, but are very bright. Now if the lamp and column can be installed at an existing connection, that is money saving.
So this proposal deserves further consideration and if it were part of a phased programme, then it could work.
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LED street lighting is almost certainly the future, but has no place in the present until the technology has been developed much further so that energy efficiency does not rely on SPDs (spectral power distributions) with a high proportion of output in the blue part of the spectrum.
There is also the issue of glare - in order to get the energy efficiency up (and sell their crap products) LED manufacturers are exposing residents to the LEDs themselves whose brightness is much greater than a sodium bulb.
Then there's the issue of flicker. As LEDs run off AC they operate at a particular frequency (Hz) and there is concern at Public Health England about the frequency of this pulsing on and off - especially if two different models of LED street light are operating in the same vicinity at different frequencies.
Then there's the disturbance to plant and animal ecosystems due to the fact that LED street lighting (currently) makes the night seem like day due to the high blue content - disturbing the body clocks of diurnal animals.
Finally there's the issue of blue light pollution and the atmosphere and sky glow.
Look it all up folks - its there on the internet - all the stuff that the LED lighting manufacturers would rather you didn't know and the guys at the council haven't figured out yet - even though there was a Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution report on Artifical Light in the Environment published in November 2009 which warned about all this ............
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Unfortunately some of the new bulbs seem to give out a signal in the audio range, but then my daughter who complained does claim to be able to hear the internet.
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Tris,
My source wasn't the internet, it was an LED lighting course run by the Institute of Lighting Professionals. Having said that, I accept that my hasty comment wasn't particularly well written - I was referring to the 'imperfect' conversion of mains AC to DC by LED drivers, often using PWM, and often at a frequency which is considered to be too low from the point of view of health - even though it may be visually imperceptible, it can still affect the human brain. It is an issue that Public Health England are concerned about - particularly situations where different models of LED street light operate at different frequencies and are visible from one place.
The 'colour' (CCT) of (white) LEDs is determined by how thick the yellow phospor layer is which 'filters' the blue light from the LED itself. Colour Rendition (CRI) isn't the same thing. Please also note that we are not discussing "[LED] lamps aimed at domestic situtaions" but LED street lighting.
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Tris,
Yes there are variations on the type of technology - however with street lighting it all comes down to £s.
What you need to understand is that LED luminaires are 3-4 times the price of sodium ones. The only way LED companies can make a business case (and even then its marginal and full of dodgy assumptions) is to justify the invesment on the grounds of energy savings.
The only way that they can claim that the figures stack up is for the efficiency (lumens/watt) figures to be pushed to the max - and in order to achieve that the yellow phosphor layer over the LEDs is made as thin as possible in order to allow as much (blue) light through the layer as possible. As a result, you get higher efficiency but at the price of high levels of polluting blue light.
Yes you can reduce the blue content, either by going for lower CCTs which have SPDs with a lower blue content, or, as they've done in more than one ecologically sensitive project in the USA to go for FLED - filtered LED - with all the harmful blue emissions filtered out.
The trouble is, by the time you make LED street lights 'benign' to the end user they cannot be justified on the basis of cost v energy savings.
But as I've said before on here, this is something the LED lighting industry don't want us to know, and in most cases the local government officers and elected representatives don't understand enough about it to reject the technology until its been developed to a point where it can be cost-effective AND non damaging to health and the environment.
DEFRA were warned of this in 2009, the question is why haven't they - or another UK government department such as DfT - at least provided formal guidance on the subject for local authorities, if not legislated to limit the amount of blue light emitted at night time.
The feedback I've received suggests that the topic doesn't sit 'cleanly' within the portfolio of a sole government department, as as such it has been overlooked.
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Tris and Simon: I'm still a local councillor for a few weeks, so I'd like to know more about this and formally ask for some written answers.
Before I do so, could I please ask you both to help give me the detailed questions I need to ask in a Member Enquiry. And also, where else I should write to for some authoritative answers. Residents in my ward appreciate better lighting and safer streets. They also deserve clear factual information.
(Tottenham Hale ward councillor alan.stanton@virgin.net)
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Alan,
Thanks for your response on this. I'm happy to provide as much help and information on this topic as I can. In my view, the worrying trend towards high-blue content LED street lighting is because of a lack of understanding of the wider environmental issues by those who are involved in the process. Central government do not appear to be providing any counter-balance to the hype and PR-spin from the LED lighting companies, leading to the choice of street lighting being based on cost-benefit equations driven almost exclusively by energy savings, even though those savings rely on lighting with far too much blue content.
I will drop you an email with further information shortly. It is worth pointing out that I sent a similar email to Barking & Dagenham Council last week, and the Mayor immediately referred the matter to their Director of Public Health.
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Or - as other more prudent councils are doing - they are sticking with sodium and reducing the bulb wattage from 70w to 50w and dimming by 50%-75% between, say, midnight and 0500.
The reason the councils who have chosen the LED option have to increase the column height/decrease the column spacing is because of the nature of LED street lighting luminaires - which aren't ideally suited to the task - because they emit a very bright (dangerously so?) beam with poor 'spread'.
Yet again, something the LED lighting industry would prefer we didn't understand ..........
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I guess no one liked my original suggestion; how about fitting IR/movement sensors to them so that they were only on when needed. Would be fun watching them go on and off as the foxes prowl around. :-)
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Simon, do you have a reference or link for the Publicc Health England report? I would be interested
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