Forums Forums Wirral Information Wirral Council Wirral Council nearly £3 million on LED Lights

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 : Click Me

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

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