Somerville to buy streetlights from NStar, needs help finding broken ones first

[squirrelitude]

For those of you who don't subscribe to Resistat...

Somerville plans to buy the streetlights from NStar to cut down on maintenance costs (and replace the lights with LEDs). Your job is to:

1. Notice lights that are dark at night, on during the day, or flicker on and off.
2. Report them to NStar (via phone or web form).
3. Tell 311 (via Twitter, phone, or Facebook) which lights you've reported.

Contact details are on the resistat page I linked.

I hope the LED lights are more focused and shine less into my window at night...

Comments

[emcicle.livejournal.com]

I hope they use warm light LEDs, because the cold/blue light ones are not very welcoming/friendly and always seem kind of creepy to me.

[starphire.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, that's not very likely because warm white LEDs are less efficient than cool white ones, and with the higher cost of LED lights (at installation, perhaps not in lifetime cost) there should be a cost premium both up front (more LEDs to get the same amount of light as the cool white version) and in operating costs (because that also means more power consumption for equivalent brightness).

There are neutral white LEDs that are about as efficient as cool white, so the best I'd hold out hope for is something middling.

[intuition-ist.livejournal.com]

crowdsourcing streetlight maintenance...whatever will they think of next?

[rmd.livejournal.com]

One of my hobbies is reporting traffic signals that are having trouble, so I'm looking forward to including street lights in my civic-minded nagging.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

and hopefully they shine DOWN not up

#

[squirrelitude]

Of course, there's nothing to be done for it when there's snow reflecting the lights.

...unless the day/night sensor pointed downwards!

ETA: I guess they'd also have to be variable-brightness.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing a day/night sensor pointing downward would result in a lighting turning on and off constantly (as it would decide it's night, turn on, reflect light at itself, turn off, decide it was night, ad nauseum). Unless the variable-brightness would be to solve that problem? Maybe two sensors, one for on/off pointing at the sky, one for brightness pointed at the ground.

[squirrelitude]

Thermostats have the same problem, except it's OK for them to bounce between on and off states, just not very quickly. Likewise, the streetlight's circuit would have to use hysteresis of some sort.

I like the 2-sensor solution.

[starphire.livejournal.com]

If LED fixtures did that, it would only be due to a lousy/cheap control system, IMO.

It's quite common to see a slow on/off oscillation in HID streetlights, because they require a long warm-up period (many seconds) before they come to full brightness, and there's no intelligence in them to detect and prevent such a feedback loop from running.
In fact, the one nearest our house has been doing this for months (and I reported it a while back yet it still hasn't been fixed, so I'm currently all for NSTAR getting out of the equation here).

LEDs are essentially instantaneous to full power, so the same optical feedback loop would be very very short in comparison. Sure, they *could* switch on and off so fast in such a feedback loop as to make you dizzy, but that's also easily avoided with a bit of clever programming (they already have microprocessors in them anyway). In fact, you can make that speed work for you instead: If the sensor seems to indicate it's now daytime, turn off the light for a fraction of a second, check if the sensor seems to say it's now night, and if it does then assume it's a false alarm from reflected light, then keep the light on for a while before checking the sensor again. You wouldn't even notice the brief outages. If brief flashes of light from headlights or other interference is also a problem, check several times before deciding to change state. It's not like a streetlight has to make up its mind whether it's day or night right away...

[boblothrope.livejournal.com]

Sodium vapor lights cycle on and off when the bulb gets old, not because of a daylight sensor feedback loop.

[starphire.livejournal.com]

True, and that's undoubtedly the most common cause (and probably what's wrong with the one on our street).
But I've seen the feedback loop thing cause them to cycle too, and I meant to be replying specifically to comments about that phenomenon. Something changes in the environment, and the sensor has to be repositioned or hooded to break the loop.

[rethcir.livejournal.com]

Any white will be better than ugly pink/orange in my opinion!

It's a shame we can't go back to gas lights like beacon hill!