OT(Slightly) Street Lamp Infrastructure.

The CB is rated to protect the cabling to the lamp. It is unlikely to be a 400w lamp, sodiums are usually around 80w.

It is entiely feasible to use street lamp supplies for electric vehicle charging.

I'd be more worried about the safety of this. I do hope you sent an email to the managing authority. If its a main road it will be the highways agency, unless in a metropolitan area in which case it coule be either the local council or the metropolitan authority if its a major road. All street lanps have numbers I am told. Brian

Would they not have to have a smart meter for being able to charge and would we start to see rip off prices in some areas, I wonder? Brian

It may be a 25A or even lower BS88 fuse in the cutout though. Or perhaps that's the last post in a line and they use the same unit on every post for consistency.

Individual lamp posts may have capacity for a slow charger, but not a charger for every lamp post. Maybe 10 or 20 posts on one 25A street lighting circuit connecting in to the public mains.

Owain

I would guess that is just a double pole isolator switch, not a circuit breaker. The 32A just referring to the maximum current handling capacity.

The fusing is probably in the main cutout below.

Probably less than that even,

If its just the switch rating, it does not tell you much about the design capacity of the network.... there may be a 30A supply feeding the whole street of lamps.

OK so supplementary question, why use cable capable of 32A to run up a pole with an 80W lamp at the top. Repeated on many, many posts would this not lead to considerable unnecessary expense, compared with running say 5A cable?

There will be a 5 amp fuse (or similar low rating) in the red cut out at the bottom. Is the Breaker an RCD, or, maybe the isolator switch for the whole row?

As low as 70watt SON lamps.

I'd think the small surface area available makes fitting any EV equipment not commercially viable.

I wonder if streetlights are still run off a timeswitch in the local substation. That wouldn't help car charging at all.

Volt drop and , IIRC, the earth has to be 6mm minimum.

Alan has brought this to us :

Correct and suppling multiple lamps on the same circuit.

charles submitted this idea :

They use various methods...

Time clocks, mains signalling and light sensors often on top of the lamp.

Clive shows one with a 16A fuse, albeit with 20kA breaking capacity

Are they wired loop-in/loop-out on the cutout? if so a whole street worth could add up, especially if they have to cope with larger strike currents, and even more if the whole string turns on at once, rather than randomly, or in sequence.

I couldn't really see where the wire came out of the 32A device (and I wasn't going to move any cable to get a better look) but there appeared to be one armoured cable coming in at the bottom.

Paradoxically, Councils seem to have spent decades moving street lamps away from the kerb to the inside of the pavement, presumably for road safety. This means in many cases the street lamp would need to be resited to allow EV charging. I assume it would be cheaper to install a dedicated charger.

Standardisation and future proofing are the likely reasons.

It is cheaper to have a standard installation which will cater for all future lamp requirements without rewiring i.e a 32A cb does not cost much more than a 5A plus the minimum size cable say 1.00 mm2 is not greatly less cost than a 2.5 mm2. (In bulk purchase deals the cost is probably no difference).

They are mostly photo cell controlled these days with some having time switch control for midnight to 5 am switch off.

The lights in my area are remote controlled using mobile-phone frequencies. You can see the little aerials on the tops. To save money, the lights are turned off on the dot at 1am, and on at 5am. I'm sure they still have photocells to stop them being on in daylight.

As I mentioned before, what you see there is a switch not a circuit breaker.

Very similar to this unit: