Street Lights Tips

Our street lights should keep us safe while still being as efficient as possible. Street lights are present in almost every town. They give night time walkers a feeling of safety. However, there are ways to improve upon the technology that is currently present in our hometowns. Making our street lights as energy and cost efficient as possible should be considered one of the top priorites when looking to improve these lights.

Solar Lights
Solar street lights provide a high level of brightness and efficiency in addition to their long life and lack of conventional energy consumption. They are also fairly easy to install. These types of street lights are typically used in industrial parks, scenic areas, urban and district roads, many pedestrian streets and in many parking lots. They are both energy efficient and green, as it produces no pollution and can have a life of up to 20 years with little maintenance. They charge their batteries using energy from the sun, thus they require no electrical current, saving taxpayer dollars and reducing energy cost and consumption.
Fiber Optic Lighting
Fiber optic lighting is another method of reducing energy costs. They are also known as "light pumps" and "remote source" lighting. These systems create their light at a separate factory, then send it through fiber optic cables laid into the ground. These bulbs rarely need to be replaced, thus reducing maintenance and replacement cost. The only significant cost related to this type of commercial street light would be the expense of laying fiber optic cables from the remote lighting facility to the high bay induction lamp. They also produce no heat in the bulb. They are typically used in outdoor signs, theatre stage lighting and hazardous locations, as well as in street lights.
Induction Lighting
Another efficient type of lighting is induction lighting. Also known as electrode-less lighting, this type of street light consists of a generator, a power coupler and a lamp. As the name implies, there are no filaments or electrodes present in the lamp. These lamps have large power factors and fast ignition and re-ignition times, so it wastes less energy when firing up. These lamps also have a 100,000 life hour rating, over four times the normal fluorescent and HID bulbs. These bulbs have a wattage ranging from 23 to 165 watts, so you can find something almost always to fit your lamps and your lighting needs.
LED Lighting
Another tip for how to improve your energy efficiency is to install LED, or light emitting diode, lights into our street lamps. This method of lighting our streets can take many incarnations. There are five types currently being employed: the integral, retrofit, solar, high pole, and tunnel street lights. The electrodeless induction ceiling lights are expected to maintain 50,000 hours of life between bulbs. They also are rated to save as much as 75 percent of the energy that traditional bulbs use.