We live in a small village and have one of the few old mercury lamps right outside the bedroom.
It used to come on at dusk and go off just after midnight. Something has gone wrong or been adjusted because it now stays on until 2.30 am.
Does anyone know how they work ? I assume the switch on is light sensitive and the off a timer. About 6 in the area seem to be linked to the same timings. Can I just ask the council to readjust something before I purchase some blackout curtains ! ?
Chris
"to report problems with street lights, traffic lights, pedestrian crossings or illuminated bollards or to complain about their location, please contact your local council. If you are reporting problems with temporary traffic lights, please provide relevant contact details where possible. If reporting a problem with the street light outside your house, the more information you can give, the better (that is, the light is out altogether, its going on and off, its burning all day, is intermittent etc.), include the number of the column - if you cannot see this then please state the exact location or adjacent house number.
If the lamp column outside your house is leaning or damaged, an inspector will come out to assess the damage and then determine how urgent the job is.
If you would like to find out the service available in your local area, please contact your local council. Your council will also normally provide a service for emergency or out of hours situations."
you can find your council here:
Not an expert, but I believe that street lamps are switched on by a light sensitive switch, probably there is one between umpteen lamps, you could see them on top of the selected lampost, a little perspex cylinder, none of which helps you of course. On the bright side, they are replacing old lamp with new full cut-off fixtures on a replacement basis nowadays, so that should cut down the glare a bit for you when they get around to your lamp-fitting.
Andy.
If you can find the sensor, and arrange a tripod with a laser pointer pointed at it, with a small power supply in place of the batteries, that may work.
It's probably just timer driven, but using an automatic daylight adjustment for the 'on' time, which is a standard feature of timeswitches which used to be used before photocells took over. It sounds like the timeswitch has lost 2½ hours. They usually had a spring backup to cover powercuts, but that will run down eventually.
Yes. They probably subcontract it out, but they'll know who the subcontractor is. They might just swap it for a photocell, in which case it will be on all night.
Err, no, there are such things as 1/2 night controllers......
Not sure who is responsible these days, but this used to be done by Electricity Boards in the days before privatisation. It is a simple adjustment of a timeswitch that is required.
Colin Bignell
Which is exactly what I described in the text you quoted in full. I used to have a mechanical one (could be set for 1/2 night, full night, and a few other plans). Quite a remarkable piece of mechanical engineering. Mine didn't have the spring reserve option fitted, but I believe streetlamp ones normally did.
There was also a chip which could do something similar developed some ~30 years ago. It switches on at dusk and tries to switch off at a fixed time. It does this by measuring the length of the dusk to dawn period to estimate the time it gets dusk, and thus works out how long the light needs to be on after dusk in order to switch off at a fixed time. When reset following a power cut, the first night it will leave the light on all night as it has no idea how long the dusk to dawn period is. On subsequent nights, it will have learned the dusk to dawn period and calculates when to switch the light off. The learning would cover a few days of data so that one dark afternoon would not throw it wildly off track. However, this appeared on the schene just as councils were reconfiguring all their streetlighting to run all night and converting from expensive error prone daylight adjusting mechanical timeswitches to cheap reliable photocells, so I'm not sure there was ever much uptake of it. I bought one and played with it on a breadboard layout, but I never deployed it in any finished design.
Increase the laser power a bit and it may never bother you again. Theres a chance the police might though.
NT
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