Experiments of City Street Lights For Money Saving

We don’t want to describe the street lights as expensive stuff. But government should let the taxpayers know that their money is spent correctly. So people try to get some idea about save money by buying the street lights at low price or using energy-saving solar street lights.

For an evaluation that will run about another two weeks, the Department of Public Works Division of Traffic Safety installed lights from four companies in the existing lamps.

“We asked vendors to give us new light fixtures that use less electricity, but produce as much light as we presently have,” said Town Engineer David Kraus. Venders were required to supply lights that fit in the existing globes with some retrofitting.

“We want people to judge the amount of light and the appearance of it.”

The town’s standard in its commercial centers is to “light the sidewalk just as much as the roadway,” he said.

LED (light emitting diode) technology uses a diode rather than a filament, and requires about half the energy because fewer watts are needed to produce the same amount of lumens. The decorative lights have metered service so that reductions in electricity will produce “instant savings,” said Mark Halenbeck of the traffic safety division.

“There are 6,500 street lights in town. The bill for lighting them is $450,000 a year,” Kraus said.

Most roads in town have street lights on every other pole, but some have lights on every pole. For those locations, the town is planning to turn every other light off at midnight, making it uniform throughout town.

CL&P, with the approval of the Public Utilities Control Commission, sets rates for these unmetered lights. “Right now, CL&P is asking for a rate for midnight lights that would turn on at dusk and off at midnight,” Kraus said.

He estimated it would reduce the energy cost for each individual light by about half.

They are trying to use LED lights to reduce energy consuming. And they will absolutely shift to solar street lights someday because the solar street lights could produce energy from sunlight for lighting.

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