Energy saving auto dimming street lights

In the UK they save even more money by simply not lighting the roads.

In message , Huge writes

Her indoors has now rung the council 6 times about the failed street light outside our house. Because of its situation on a corner, the area is pitch black and the pavement (and the road) is potholed.

She has been told that they only repair lights every 3 months and hospitals have priority, whatever that means. When asked who would be responsible if an old person had a fall because of the lack of lighting, the council representative said she could not answer that.

The appointment of the current contractor featured in Private Eye at the time.

Worse than this is that small "refuge islands" have been installed in the centre many of the main roads. These have a central pole with a light on top and a lit-from-beneath bollard each side. On most of these all the lights have now failed and many of the bollards have disappeared, presumably having been hit by vehicles.

They hung Christmas lights on the streetlights through the town, but only on the working ones. It's hard to understand why they couldn't have put a box of bulbs on the cherry picker before they set off.

I take it this is Highways she's rung, and that one of you has reported the potholes on the council website?

Norway is a *lot* richer than the UK.

In message , Tim Streater writes

Yes, she has a reference number from them.

The council website reports

"The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified. Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem."

Because that's the kind of joined up thinking that the State in general and local councils in particular are incapable of.

In US recently, in one city: "Officials say about 34 miles of copper has been stolen from highway lights citywide." ===

"Copper theft continuing to darken Tulsa highway lights, setting back expensive repair work ... ... "There?s been a recent rash of thefts," Ball said Wednesday. "After we got the lights back on, they came back and stole all the copper that was left."

Hang on is this not going to be a little off-putting for people going the other way or pedestrians etc? I could understand lights that dim as the sun comes up or get brighter as it sets. Brian

Not hard at all its compartmentalisation often occurs due to different bits of the services being tendered out to different companies. Wait till you see what happens next month when banking services can be run by anybody as long as you money stays in a bank its safe. I see BT running cash machines or doing transfers, and advice for ininvesting in Tescos or almost anything else, also of course if the banks lose their money making delayed transfers, they will want to charge us for keeping our money.

As for streetlights, it is very difficult to tell who to complain to. all lamps are supposed to be numbered and some are done by Higways agency, while others are council. In london its split three ways, Highways agency, TFL and each council. In theory they should all talk to each other but we all know how reliable that is. Brian

The council will not save money due to street lights not working. They are not individually metered. The Council pay based on the number and type of lamps and the number of hours of datkness measured by a typical photocell.

Only the Electricity Supplier would get a small benefit.

The council should want to repair it as it is still being charged for the power it isn't using.

Brian Gaff pretended :

t'other way works better, bright when ambient is bright, dimmer when there is no ambient.

There has been a trend to switch off the lights on rural roads/motorways outside busy periods. In some cases, they have been permanently switched off. Also, many have been changed to delay switch-on until much lower light level than used to be the case.

In UK, many of the new LED streetlamps which are controlled by mesh networks have their light level set remotely, and automatically adjusted at different times of night. They can be adjusted for once-off events too, when a council is prepared to pay extra to have them on brighter for longer if there's a local event resulting lots of people around later.

I am not aware of occupancy sensing type controls in the UK, although they are used in some parts of continental Europe, particularly on pedestrian footpaths.

The LED lights at our railway station and a footpath outside seem to sense the presence of a person; they get brighter when you approach.

Sounds like they should he using CCA instead of copper

NT

Note - Your post was posted in sci.misc, but most of these posts here are coming via uk.d-i-y group, where my original post was reposted there via reply post with both groups included.

Different method here,

"As a way to curb street lights power consumption and unnecessary light pollution, Geolux proposes to selectively and progressively turn on the street lights when they are needed, that is, when a pedestrian or when traffic are detected on the street."

Sounds good if it works, but I noticed they haven't included costing but just claimed up to 80% saving without saying how much this will cost to install. We've used zigbees here, but they seem to hgave gone out of fashion now. Surely it'd be better using AI and IoT for this.

The LED lighting in Sainsbury's do that (quite subtly) you have to go down an unpopular aisle when the shop is deserted to see it, also a local multi-storey has fluoro tubes that gently dim up and down as you walk past different sections.

I wonder how much energy this sort of thing actually saves. I'd have thought curtains over the chilled food sheleves would save more.

Ah - for me it was originally in sci.misc!

And for interest, talking to a colleague who is much closer to the industry, I'm told that UK motorways already have the ability to automatically dim/turn off the lighting based on traffic presence using the existing lane sensors[1], but that it's rarely used.