The impact of streetlights on the safety of road users and residents has been well documented. Streetlights increase visibility and prevent the movement of criminals while driving. Street lighting is one of the biggest costs of the City Council. The cost lies in erecting, stimulating and maintaining street lights. These energy costs for stimulating street lights are the largest component. A typical municipality spends three times as much energy as the lights.
As a result, streetlights are used worldwide by municipalities, private homes, pastures, gated residential areas, college and university complexes, hospitals and shopping centers, warehouse complexes, and in-plant roads.
The main reason for the high cost is
Temporary installation light
2. Over-illumination in certain areas
3. Manual / Irregular Switch Operation
Given the importance of streetlights and the costs involved in providing such essential services, those involved in the decision-making process must keep abreast of the development of lighting technology. By benchmarking and monitoring energy consumption, the advantages of modern technology products can be easily established.
Some ways to reduce street lighting costs are
1. Replace inefficient lamps
2. Reduce the number of lights
3. Install efficient switching equipment
4. Reduce business hours
5. Improve maintenance and data management
6. Improve input voltage quality / optimize power factor
Many people think that installing automatic switching devices is the best way to reduce energy consumption. In practice, efforts to address lighting intensity are the easiest to implement and the lowest cost.
Street lighting options
Incandescent bulbs are outdated and inefficient, but they are still in use. Their use is most common in areas that are prone to frequent theft or damage to fixtures. In these places, very high replacement rates may be the case with these cheap bulbs. In any other place, they are too wasteful and meaningless. After all, when the replacement LED system uses 7 times the energy and can run for 50,000 hours, 5% efficiency and hundreds of hours of life are hard to bear.
High-intensity discharge (HID) lamps – including mercury vapor lamps (outdated and almost extinct), metal halide lamps and high pressure sodium lamps (HPS).
Metal halide lamps – These lamps operate at high temperatures and pressures, emit ultraviolet light, and require special fixtures to reduce the risk of injury or accidental fire when a so-called “non-passive failure” occurs or when an explosion occurs at the end of the lamp. To the lowest. Useful life. A small fire in the Harvard greenhouse was started by a light that was not properly included. These cannot be activated at full brightness because the gas in the lamp takes time to heat up.
In addition, each time the light is turned on, it takes 5 to 10 minutes of re-attack time before turning on the light. Therefore, these lights are not suitable for use with an intelligent control system to turn the lights on and off. The mercury content of these lamps is also not a joke. A 1500 watt lamp may contain up to 1000 milligrams of mercury.
High Pressure Sodium Lamp (HPS) – is one of the most popular street lighting options. These are rated as the most effective on the “lumen/watt” scale. The disadvantage is that the narrow-spectrum light they produce is mostly sick yellow. These lamps have a very low color rendering index and cannot faithfully reproduce colors. These lights are not favored by the police because it is difficult to determine the color of the suspect’s clothes and vehicles from the witness account in the event of a crime. For a 100 watt bulb, these contain 1 to 22 milligrams of mercury, and each bulb contains an average of 16 milligrams of mercury. Unsafe handling of these bulbs can result in significant exposure of humans and wildlife to mercury-contaminated water and food.
Mercury contamination issues and customer preferences for full-spectrum lights have been driving the replacement of these lights, especially in self-managed residential areas where people can pay directly for light quality.
Compared to HPS and LED lamps, fluorescent lamps – mercury content, have poor energy efficiency and can be plagued by these lights when used in street lighting applications. Other problems are sensitivity to low pressure faults and breakage of the glass components.
LED street light
LED technology offers several advantages over other lighting options.
1)Low light pollution – LEDs produce directional light. Almost all of the light from these street lights is directed downwards, reducing light pollution. Light pollution is an enemy of astronomers. Even with special filter binoculars to cut off ambient light, it is difficult to observe the sky. Light pollution and minor intrusions can also affect human emotions, the navigation of birds and insects, the mating behavior of animals and the flowering of plants.Directional lamps also increase efficiency because 20-50% of the wasted light is now used to illuminate the road.
2) Energy efficiency – LED lamps are 7 times more energy efficient than incandescent lamps and 2 times more efficient than fluorescent lamps. Only high-end HPS lamps are more energy efficient than LED bulbs. From cradle to serious research, LEDs may be more cost effective if they affect the environmental impact of HPS lamp production and transportation. In addition, LEDs are increasingly efficient.
3) Intelligent Lighting Control – Intelligent systems use computers to optimize lighting. Light can be dimmed or turned off during low flow periods, selectively illuminating a single light or group of lights as traffic approaches, and reducing light intensity during dusk. It is also possible to selectively change the color of the light to ensure optimal visibility under different conditions. For example, at night, the reddish glow of the sky may make it difficult to observe things. Light sources that emit blue light at night will complement the reddish natural light and help improve visibility. LED lighting systems can meet all of these needs.
4) Excellent color rendering index – HPS lamps may produce more original lumens, but because they mainly produce yellow light, the contrast is poor and the visibility is poor. Fewer, well-oriented lumens from LED lamps can accomplish the work of larger HPS lamps.
5)Low carbon footprint for manufacturing – LEDs are made of plastic and wire – Other options usually have heavy metal substrates that use more energy to make. In addition, LEDs last 4 to 10 times longer than any other bulb, further reducing the carbon footprint of the manufacturing process.
6)Low replacement cost – The cost of LED lights and traditional light bulbs is not comparable. When HPS only needs $9 million, a good LED lighting device can cost $20 million to implement. The cost of replacement costs and HPS costs increased to nearly $45 million. Clearly, LEDs are a more cost effective option.
The many advantages of LED street lights make them popular. The availability of DOE funds has driven investment in energy-saving lamps. Ann Arbor (carbon dioxide emission reduction 1000 lamps equivalent to 2445 tons, investment payback period of 3.8 years), Seattle (its utility utilities lead the wave of energy-saving lighting equipment testing), New York, Los Angeles (140,000 street lights will be converted to LED systems) Pittsburgh (40,000 lamps), Düsseldorf, Germany, and Ontario, Canada, are shining examples of how LED technology can start from the small lights in the dashboard and continue to help develop thinner, brighter, Less power-hungry computer monitors are turning energy usage patterns into more mainstream uses.
