Energy Saving Street Lighting

Efficient Street Lighting

This page is written to show the information which is already not published. Links are given for the works already done on the subject:

For basics introduction to lighting devices click on following links.

Basic introduction about different efficient lighting devices

Training site for lighting professional

Overview Street Lighting

General tips:

Gas discharge lighting is established standard for street lighting, for example metal halide high intensity discharge (HID) and Linear fluorescent tubes (LFT). Compact fluorescent lamps are not recommended here because of life of CFL varies between 6000 to 10,000 hours, while life for Linear fluorescent lights is in between 24000 to 46000 hours.

LED street lighting is also available, but it has a few advantages, uniform light distribution profile, long life, but is available only 200-250 W fixtures giving about 15000 lumens. Light output efficiency is not better than HID and if we are using 400W HID lamp, than we have to buy two fixture to maintain light level as compared with HID. Light efficiency of 58 lumens / watt @ 200 Watts Street light installation is available. Generally again HID / LFT are recommended, while LED lighting can be used on trial basis where 200 -250 Watt conventional lighting is required.

Click on This Calculator for evaluating LED in any new application, because it will depend upon different prices (energy / labor) that vary from location to location, so general recommendation cannot be made for LED installation

Light efficiencies of 85 to 100 lumens / Watt are common in HID & LFT categories.

Light distribution / throw profile is also important factor for street lights, depending upon position of the pole and target space to throw light on.

Beware!

In Linear Fluorescent Tubes (LFT), minimum life comes in market about 24000 hours, doesn’t matter who is the manufacturer, but still need careful consideration for any system implementation, because in large volume application a small saving will become big saving while a small miss will result in large losses that can be avoided.

Fake LFT are not available in the market but the fake ballasts are very common, be careful.

Each LFT, or HID is designed to operate with a specific ballast and fixture, so while choosing design, we also need consideration for fixture and ballast as well.

Marketing

Street lights are mostly used by Government agencies, where mostly sub standard devices are actually used while billed at the rate of highest quality equipment. This is also common for big privately owned organizations. “Bigger the organization, it’s efficiency is smaller”. To grab maximum share from the market, manufacturer have to make two brands in each type of product, one the cheaper one while the other quality oriented.

Types of Efficient Industrial Lighting

HID & LFT, categories have variety of options available to suit particular application. Even without detailed analysis one can use LFT, HID for general industrial application. Specific applications need particular choice from the following category.

Similarly it contains various ballast types, such as:

Some lighting manufacturer also offer useful web programmers to assist in lighting design such as

LFT retrofit calculator.

Outdoor lighting LED Payback Calculator Vs HID

There are also some other manufacturers of lighting products and may have other similar or useful programmers, such as Philips and Osram.