The first of thousands of new LED street lights were installed in Wirral last week as the Council begins delivery of one of its most significant investment projects in recent times.
Wirral Council is spending nearly £3 million on the installation of 7,500 LED lighting units between August 2015 and March 2016 as part of a strategy that will deliver a range of immediate benefits and significant savings in the long-term.
The first units were installed along Whetstone Lane in Birkenhead on Monday and representatives from the various organisations who have worked alongside the council to deliver the project were on-hand to see the switch on.
Source :
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If your spending a miillion or more on led bulbs wouldnt it be cheaper to buy direct from manufacturer Urbis rather than a middleman Maclean Electrical. Would have thought urbis could wire them as necessary.
Single contract is often the way to go, if there are problems then there is only one point of responsibility to deal with, their sub-contractors are their problem. I presume there is a maintenance period built into the contract as well.
Maclean are making their money out the labour, there may not be much markup. Urbis would be more likely to discount Maclean from whom they may get repeat orders, a one-off sale to Wirral Council is unlikely to attract the highest discount.
There are many ways of looking at it, I just put the above up as food for thought.
Dont think it is a single contract. Buying from maclean and fitted by sse according to the news article.lets hope the led bulbs last a long time and do a good job
We researched this about ten years ago and it was cost-effective then. Since then the cost of electricity has soared and wages have risen so they must be really effective now. Not accounting for the improvement in reducing CO2.
Well done the council; for once
We researched this about ten years ago and it was cost-effective then
I'd love to see some figures on this, all my fag packet calculations seem to be well different from the council's.
They say they are going to making a saving of £55 per year on every fitting (£390,000 saving on 7000 street lamps 2016/2017).
Your Fag packet may be adrift! Look at the difference in consumption between a 700w high pressure sodium lamp and a 150w LED. Life of hps and led around 20000hours, labour, plant and contractors to carry out the replacements of hps as needed and planned routine replacements at end of life of LEDs. It's all win.
I carried out such changes when I was at work twenty years ago and it won all ways then.
Interestingly I put this forward to Wirral council about five years ago and they reported back that it was not economic: then Liverpool announced it was doing it and immediately Wirral changed its mind, ha ha. There is a good web page from a streetlamp manufacturer giving the figures if you are interested.
Price of HPS and LED are comparable.
Life expectancies are comparable.
You'd more likely to need at least 500W of LED to replace 700W of HPS, even then the lumens are less but the colour spectrum makes up for it - with some people's eyesight.
So the savings are purely on the electricity, the majority of sodium fittings aren't as high as 700W, how is it possible to save £55 a year per fitting on electricity including the claw back of £400 per fitment.
20 years ago we didn't have high power LED's, we didn't have white LED's. You'd be talking about fittings with many hundreds of low power LED's whose reliability many of us have experienced (the more parts, the less reliable).
Wait... show me a streetlight with a 700w lamp in it?
Doubt it.
The tall ones
Just a thought in a few years time will everyone be walking around wearing sunglassesdue to the damaging effect these lights have on the eyes, its bad enough most cars have them fitted these days! only time will tell i suppose,
And as for doing streetlights, wish they would hurry up and do the one outside my place, its only taken them two years so far, just waiting for the bulb fitting now!
diggingdeeper, I imagine most street lighting is between 30w and 150w at the moment. That horrible yellowy glow you see in some places is quite often the fairly efficient 30/35W SOX low pressure sodium which you can't really improve on using LED. SOX lamps offer a fairly good lumen output per watt.
However, I very, very much doubt you'll find a street light any bigger than a 250W SON anywhere... these can be replaced with 50-100W LED so the savings are fairly obvious.
keef666, most cars don't have LED headlights, only very few actually. You're thinking of xenon. Although I'm sure more and more will.
What research have you been reading or carrying out to come to the conclusion that these light sources will cause damage?
Cheers.
Only the led sellers say you can replace a 250w son with a 50w or 100w led because they want to sell on power saving.
250w SON is about 28,000 lumen
50W LED is 4,500W
100W LED is 9,000 lumen
It's a con like the early days of CFL in homes, they said equivalent to 100W and you could barely see your fingers in front of your face.
Had a drive round Birkenhead looking at the new LED lights, quite a few roads have now been fitted. Saw two weren't working and one was flashing which wasn't a brilliant start, some others weren't on at end of rows but these may not have been wired.
Lighting wise I was very impressed but these are fairly tall ones so presumably higher power, brightness was good as well as evenness of cover. A zillion times better than the older LED ones in Woodchurch lane (which also had a faulty one!)
Looking at the older sodium lights round town, there are a horrendous amount of these not working, I estimated about 15% from counting as I drove round a fairly random route, in many places there are two or three in a run not working.
In Tollemache Road today and they had left the old lamp heads on the floor by the lamp post---presume for the clearance team to follow on and collect them. Thing was that about 80% of them were on between 10am and 6pm---presume this is for testing or maybe someone doesn't know there AM from the PM
Like this one today 9:30am lol
Like this one today 9:30am lol
yes indeed the one on the corner of tollemache and speedwell
If they cut down the trees around some of the street lighting, then the money saved in electricity by the street lights only working from dusk to dawn could help to cut the £3million spend on led street lights
They are so much better.
Description: Tollemache Road
Description: Tollemache Road
They seem to be concentrating on the wider roads at the moment, they are impressive aren't they? The speed of roll out is equally impressive.
£55 a year is about 15p a day.
I expect the council is paying about 4p a kWh (wholesale) for its juice, so they would have to save about 4kWh a day.
If the lights are on for 12 hours this is about a third of a kWh per hour. In other words, the LEDs would have to take 330W less than the existing lights.
This seems implausible to me, but I guess they can switch the LEDs off completely in the wee small hours, as well as dimming them the rest of the time.
I'm glad they've started installing them however. I wonder how far from the centre of Birkenhead they will get before they've blown all the cash?
One council states their street lights (non-led) electrickery costs between £40-£80 a year each depending on size and another works out at an average £70 a year. Scotland as a whole averages at £46 each.
I'm still waiting to see the smaller side road lamps after seeing the abysmal older Woodchurch Lane LEDs.
Yes, the Woodchurh lane ones really are appalling.
I was interested to learn Liverpool has decided to switch to LEDs. I have a good view of Liverpool from my home but can't see much evidence of it yet. It is the usual galaxy of horrible orange for the most part
Yes, the Woodchurh lane ones really are appalling.
I was interested to learn Liverpool has decided to switch to LEDs. I have a good view of Liverpool from my home but can't see much evidence of it yet. It is the usual galaxy of horrible orange for the most part
I wonder if this contract covers maintenance of these new lamps? Led's have a long life, but their brightness degrades with time.
We will be seeing them now at their best and brightest, but how good will they be after 10,000 hours of use, which at 12 hours a day is only about two and a quarter years? They may have gone down to between 50% and 70%. This is in theory hardly noticeable, but only time will tell whether it really is.
The LED system they are fitting doesn't put them up to full power initially, as they get older and dimmer they increase the power to offset the ageing.
I was comparing two very similar long, wide roads tonight, one with LED and the other with recent high pressure sodium. They are comparable, maybe the LED just has the edge light and colour wise but there isn't that much in it. I'll try and photograph both with the same camera settings sometime, I have a feeling a camera will show a bigger difference than my eyesight perceives.
Is there any published plan of where these new lights are to be deployed?
If not, why not?
Is there any published plan of where these new lights are to be deployed?
If not, why not?
That would involve Wirral Council communicating openly, its hard enough to get information out the Council that they are legally obliged to provide.
You could put a Freedom of Information request in to them on the FOI site, on their usual track record they will answer late and even then may claim immunity or just answer a different question from what you ask.
Noticed them on the road from Spital dam to lower Bebington (Bromborough road??) the other evening. They were quite impressive and gave a good clear white light.
If your spending a miillion or more on led bulbs wouldnt it be cheaper to buy direct from manufacturer Urbis rather than a middleman Maclean Electrical. Would have thought urbis could wire them as necessary.
I don't think they are led
bulbs. The LEDs are built into the fitting. LEDs are more efficient and generate less heat than conventional lights, but they are more heat sensitive. The efficiency drops off with temperature so they need better heat sinks - fins etc. You need a whole different fitting.
Noticed them on the road from Spital dam to lower Bebington (Bromborough road??) the other evening. They were quite impressive and gave a good clear white light.
They are the recent High Pressure Sodium lamps, not LED. The lit area and quality is nearly identical but on LED ones you can see the two parallel rows of LED's when you look at the lamps, on these HPS lamps you can see a slight orange tint looking at the light itself.
They were too bright to look at, but I couldn't detect any yellow at all in them.
I wonder how long before we get this from them?
http://luxreview.com/article/2015/1...a-streetlights?cmpid=LUXproducts11122015
Things aren't boding too well.
Looked at the new LED lighting on Old Chester Road between Holborn Square and Birkett Road, at least 7 of the new lights aren't working.
Most of the lighting seems adequate (nothing special) but in areas where there isn't lights from shops or houses etc the pavements aren't well lit between lamp posts, I wouldn't be able to recognise faces of people I drove past.
Drove along the New Ferry bypass yesterday, where they have started installing them. The difference between the LEDs and the old sodium lamps' illumination levels is dramatic.
I'm still waiting for a short lamppost street.
Agree on new ferry bypass, they seem to have pulled out the stops there.
I think they are going for radial routes out of Birkenhead first. I notice the Old Chester road in Bebington is seeing them now. Perhaps they'll do connecting roads next, followed by side streets - if there are led lights to spare.
I've always hated the yellow sodium lights. they make everyone look ill, and wash out all colour from everything. The white light from leds is much more cheering I think.
I think they are going for radial routes out of Birkenhead first. I notice the Old Chester road in Bebington is seeing them now. Perhaps they'll do connecting roads next, followed by side streets - if there are led lights to spare.
I've always hated the yellow sodium lights. they make everyone look ill, and wash out all colour from everything. The white light from leds is much more cheering I think.
Yes indeed. Low pressure sodium (SOX) lamps blat most of the colour out of things. High pressure ones (SON) aren't much better either. However, the lamps that made you look as healthy as the Thing from the Swamp were the older mercury vapour lamps. They weren't colour corrected at all. ie. no phosphor coating internally. Woodchurch Road and Storeton Road had these in Metro-Vick and GEC lanterns up until the early 1970's. By comparison, someone on the mortuary slab looked pretty healthy compared to someone standing under one of those lamps !
No problem with how you looked when we had the gas lamps in side the streets during the 40s
I agree Jim. We had gas lamps in our road until the mid 60's. A cottage I visit occasionally in the Borders hills is waaaay off grid. It has gas lights throughout, albeit bottled gas. The "hiss" and "plop" of the mantle as you light it, the warm yellowish/greenish white glow - all magical stuff! The dark discolouration on the ceiling above the wall lights adds a certain something too (?).
Yes, I remember them in my primary school where there was no electricity. They were lit on a dark winter's afternoon by the teacher standing on a desk with a box of matches. They spread not only light but warmth and were much liked.
But the white light was due to Thorium which is mildly radioactive, and probably they were not very healthy things to have around the house. They were fragile and didn't last long and I would not be surprised to find measurable levels of radioactivity in the floors and ceilings around where they once were due to remainsof old mantles.
Arrowe Brook Road now has LED's, Old Chester Road has more added.
Well on the Rock Ferry bypass, work has come to a standstill. No change from last week. Only one side has been upgraded, and that is patchy. Some of the new lights appear not to be working.
It occurs to me that as these things are controlled by radio, it probably won't be long before someone finds a way to hack them, and switch them on and off for fun like christmas lights!
I notice that in mist or drizzle one can see a beam of light from these LED lamps when looking from the side. It is not visible from sodium lights, and at first I thought it might be because they are brighter. But on thinking about it, it is more likely to be due to the blue component in the light being more scattered due to its shorter wavelength, which means that they will be more attenuated by fog at ground level. It will be interesting to see how they perform in darkness and fog.
I've been wondering the same, Philips claim ...
LED delivers greater visibility in rain and fog
• Initial research shows that visibility in rain and fog is defined by two parameters: the amount of light scattering and the penetration of the light.
• The water droplets in the fog acts like tiny mirrors and causes unwanted light scattering (or glare) that affect the vision of road users.
How much light does a road surface need?
The CIE standard prescribes the amount of light required for various road categories. This requires an expressway (M1), for example, to be lit evenly at 2 candelas per square meter. However, some road lighting systems throw less light than the standard on the road surface, citing the ability of our eyes to see better with lamps offering more blue light. This is a controversial interpretation of Scopotic/Photopic (S/P) ratio, and in our opinion, leads to a dangerously under-lit road surface.
• This same research shows that white LED light produces less glare than yellow SON light in rain and fog conditions, also the penetration factor is favorable for LED.
• Some research shows that LED road lamps achieve greater light penetration through fog.
* Research in the performance of various lighting technologies or color temperatures in rain and fog conditions, is still in its infancy. No full consensus has been reached in the academic world on this topic yet. (Source: Investigation of LED Light Attenuation in Fog, K. Otas, V. J. Pakenas, A. Vaskys, P. Vaskys (2012)
ISSN: 1392 – 1215)
We'll have to see it for ourselves I guess. I think Philips' sales dept. have a more 'legalistic' approach to the laws of physics than is usual!
More and more roads are receiving their new light, and they are much better in my opinion, but installation seems to be very patchy. Some roads have them in parts and not other parts as if they are putting them in more or less randomly.
I've also noticed a number that do not seem to work and others that are on during the day. I wonder if these are in a radio shadow and are not receiving on or off instructions?
Still not found a lower height lamppost that's been done.
Saw the men changing them over yesterday by Tranmere rovers.
Maybe its only main roads that are getting them?
I was under the impression that near enough all were to be done eventually.
A lot of the lights are coming on very late, at 6:45 tonight I was driving around in darkness in a lot of areas, some lights on and some lights off.
Here is a pdf list of roads currently scheduled to be converted to LED soon
CLICKY
According to that model of accuracy, the Wirral Globe, that I flipped through in the barbers the other day, only main roads were mentioned for LED conversion in an article about street lights. It also claimed that the council was catching up on replacement work of existing lights which have failed.
Whether the ad rag has it right on the repairs is debatable I expect.
Yes, latest council statement is that the current phase of led distribution is near it's end.
If they save money why are the pausing now? There was no mention of pausing in their original proposal.
Link to list of streets being converted to LED:-
https://www.wirral.gov.uk/parking-r...s-traffic-lights-and-signs/street-lightsScroll down to near the bottom
Dave
I just looked at that led list and see vanderbyle dtive is getting done. ? Dead end road to dibbinsdale woods ?
Why who lives down there from the council.
Plus the other list does not include any street lights that i have reported so frankly its a crock off lies .
Sorry but I can't find the road you mention on that list
Dave
There's a long stretch of the Rock Ferry bypass where the wondrous new LED lights have NEVER worked on one side of the road. There is little indication that they ever will either. Nothing has been done and month after month slides marked by complete indifference from the Council.
Surely if a contractor is paid to install lights - at enormous cost - you would think SOMEONE in the council wld pick up the phone and get them to either sort them out or return the money.
What is the betting that Christmas will pass in darkness too - and probably next Christmas as well!
Another side effect- because the LED lamps are more efficient they emit significantly less heat. As a result the sea-gulls have stopped roosting on them at night. Less bird-poo dropped on the road and cars.