I guess enough of you have seen these new replacement LED street lighting heads but is it just me who thinks they are totally crap?
There's an intense pool of light directly beneath the 'emitter' and then nothing...blackness and shadows. Walking past parked cars is completely dark you don't know what you might step in or trip up over. The old Sodium lamps would put out a 'ball' of light everywhere not just in one direction like these things do.
Obvs it's all to save money in the long term but what's peoples thoughts?
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We had 'lights out' for a while but I think it was concluded to be bloody dangerous all-round so I think we're onto LED's instead.
Apparently a company in that Germany have/are designing a lamp post conversion kit so that the power previously used for the Sodium Lamp can be tapped into to create an Electric Car charging point? or something.
If you google LED street lighting you soon find evidence of potential light pollution over cities affecting the well-being of animals and human beans. Something about light emitted in the blue spectrum which can traditionally FRO. The bloody sparrows have trouble kipping at night already so get ready for full on 24hr bird shifts.
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Poor design. Leds are available in a wide range of spectrums you could easily use amber leds to replicate the colour of sodium lighting, even warm white leds would be better than what they're using. With appropriate reflection and diffusion you can limit the point source look, which will reduce shadowing.
It depends what you're using as a diffuser. Even if you aren't they can be mounted on a curved surface so they're not all pointing the same way.
This smacks of councils jumping on the LED bandwagon "'cos they're iffishunt, inni?" but having no idea what they're doing and, consequently, being ripped off by all the spivs and chancers that invariably crawl out from under rocks at such times.
All light travels in straight lines - it just depends on the optics fitted to the LED
Count yourself lucky welters, round here they've fitted dimmable metal-halide fittings and reduced the number of lamposts by at least a third.
They still don't have lights lit on 40mph or higher speed limited roads, except where someone's been run over.
They've coupled sodium lights with motion detectors here, so the lights along sections of B roads here fade into life a couple of minutes after a car has passed. Useful
I've done a lot of new LED exterior lighting & lampost installs over the last 5 or 6 years, I don't have an issue with them. They're far more efficient than SON fittings and totally maintenance free.
The reason you see less is mainly down to the colour of the light. The human eye is more sensitive to the orange (2700k) light you get from a SON lamp compared to the white (6000k) light you generally get from an LED luminaire.
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