Who fits lights to this specification?
I want an outside light that is brighter than the neighbour's. I want it to switch on whenever a car goes past or someone walks by. It must be aimed over the heads of anyone approaching my doorway. Ideally the light should flood into the windows of the houses across the road.
Ours comes on and stays on 24/7 if the power goes off for a second and then comes back on (eg when the high-voltage feed to the village fails *yet again*). I have to be alert to the problem, and turn the power to the light off (turn off the lighting circuit MCB, since the lamp appears to be hard-wired with no switch) and then turn it back on after a delay of about
10 seconds. It is a confounded nuisance.The security light is one of several that was fitted to the (pre-owned) house that we bought recently.
Fitting a security light which has no isolating switch is bizarre.
Equally bizarre is another security light which is wired into the same circuit as a normal switch-controlled outside light (ie without a PIR sensor), so if you want to arm the security light you have to have the other light permanently on. Or else you turn off the normal light and the security light doesn't work.
After Christmas I'll dig out our solar-powered security lights from our previous house and set those up in place of the 500W photoflood lights which are a liability (they annoy the neighbours and they gobble up electricity if the PIR fails to turn the light off).
Sounds like a good place for a mirror. Send back what they send to you.
The builder fitted two outside lights - both sort-of fake half lanterns with PIR.
Luckily, they take standard lamps. So I replaced the 60W or 100W ones fitted with something like 2.5 or 3W. Then added two more of the same design to improve coverage. So a total of something like 10 or 12 watts.
And it is plenty of light to check the bins, walk safely, see someone coming up the drive.
Yup, we've got one of those. To be fair it is only the range that is a problem and it does get triggered by passing cars or pedestrians. The light actually goes pretty well where it is wanted and is of a sensible power.
I have to experiment with blocking off part of the sensor yet, to detect along our driveway, but not outside - I'm waiting for a dry night, when I've got a spare half-hour to do it.
SteveW
On the other hand, that is a useful feature for many people. I can switch our front light off and on so as to "lock" it on while I do some work on the car or just look for something in the boot. Similarly, I can do the same with the garage light when I am cutting something outside, in the evening. I specifically looked out for lights with that feature as it is so useful. on the other hand, we very rarely suffer momentary power failures and I can see how it would be a real nuisance there. Maybe they should build in a 12 hour timer to cancel that feature automatically.
Our garage light didn't have one. I added one specifically so that I could turn off and on to turn it on permanently!
That is weird!
Ours are LED and so don't take too much anyway. Plus we don't suffer from intermittent supplies anyway.
On the other hand, the trickle charger for the kit-car is annoying, because if we trip the RCD (common-ish due to high leakage of too many computers and peripherals with integral filters), I have to remember that the charger has to be manually reset to resume charging - not so easy if my wife or son has reset the RCD while I am out and I don't even know that it has been off.
SteveW
Our one at the front does come on rather too easily. I too have been thinking about putting some tape on it - or similar. The one at the back is just right - comes on when pussycat gets near but not when she is a bit further away. All four come on easily for humans. So, basically, really happy.
I take the outers down each year and give them a good clean.
Have you read this? Very amusing. ;-)
That is not a spec for a light its a spec for the dingbat who fits it! Brian
When I fitted PIRs front and rear I used 2-gang plates, 1 switch via the PIR and 1 that bypasses it. Just have to remeber to turn off the bypass! As I wired it, I'm happy working on the fitting with just the 2 switches off. The lamps are about 9W R63 wide angle pointing downwards, so sorry, I won't be dazzling you!
on 29/11/2019, Steve Walker supposed :
They do - each dark to daylight transition cancels the light remaining on, or at least thats the case with every such light I have come across.
Some versions overcome the problem of brief power failures by requiring the light to be flipped off twice in quick succession to put them on permanently.
I'll fit it if someone is paying for it:-)
I've nover left one on long enough to find that out and it's not in the instructions for the ones we've got, but it it could well be an undocumented feature.
SteveW
With the sort of power cuts we had one night, even that wouldn't have prevented accidental latching of the light. At most I think I counted a run of four off-on in the course of about 5 seconds. Those automatic power-restoring circuit breakers at the substation are a little *too* enthusiastic: it would be better if there was a minimum off time of about 5 seconds to avoid false-triggering. Of course it would be even better if the power company did their job properly and made sure that vegetation was not allowed to grow close to the wires, so it could always be trimmed safely without needing a planned power cut, and certainly not so it get so close that it causes an unplanned one. A large fine to the power company for each and every power outage that a customer experiences would be a good incentive. You tend to expect flaky power when you are in the middle of nowhere, although when we lived in a tin hamlet of two farms and five cottages, I don't think the power went off once in the year we lived there, whereas when we are in a village with about 500 people, about 5 miles from two different market towns, we've had about 10 times when the power has gone off and on in the six months we've lived here (if it happens repeatedly on one day, I count that as a single event). The power company had the cheek to suggest that anyone who had electronic equipment should have it protected by UPS (an admission that power breaks were only to be expected) and that anyone whose equipment got confused by repeated power blips had faulty equipment. My router eventually got confused after an evening of up-down-up-down (the router still logged on but it gave "destination unavailable" when almost any web address was pinged - apart from the ISP's own web site; DNS was working because the address was being resolved to the correct IP address). That was cured by restoring the router to its factory state - I need to remember to re-create the port-forwarding rules so we can see our webcams from outside the LAN.
I now fit DP switches as standard on all outside lights in new builds and rewires so that the neutral is switched.
AUSTRALIA
One of the advantages of having moved house - only very modest external lights. :-)
polygonum_on_google snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:
Do what many seem to do; swap the modest lights for 500watt Eye Burners.
Or more likely these days 20 W LED eye burners that squirt light out approaching 180 degrees and are next to impossible to control the light from. It ought to be made illegal to sell floodlights with more than a 90 degree beam width.
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