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PostPosted: Tue Dec 09, 2014 8:43 pm 
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Areas of Burnham, Maldon, Great Dunmow, Saffron Walden, Colchester town and Stansted Mountfitchet will be trialling the lights, which are expected to be installed by March 2015, and around 17,000 streetlights will be converted to LED...

(the article features a close-up of a day-burning, GEC Z9480)


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PostPosted: Tue Dec 09, 2014 10:07 pm 
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The council in Castle Point, where I live, chose not to use LED and stick with the part night lighting, because apparently it's 'too expensive'. In Southend meanwhile, no new LED lights have been installed in the last two weeks (well, at least not that I know of)

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PostPosted: Tue Dec 09, 2014 10:45 pm 
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Location: Colchester, Essex

It's fascinating to see that the LED trial is only taking part in the largely rural north of the county, which is a world apart from the busier, more congested and more populous south of the county.

Colchester (population 121,859*) is the only sizeable town on the list, while the other towns on the LED trial list - Maldon (population 21,462), Burnham-on-Crouch (population 7,636), Great Dunmow (population 8,480), and Saffron Walden (population 14,313) - really are small fry compared to Essex's bigger, better-known and more urban population centres like Basildon (population 99,876), Harlow (population 82,200), Brentwood (population 49,463) and Chelmsford (population 111,511), which all miss out on the LED trial.

Having said that, it is only a trial at this stage, which is possibly why these small, out-of-the-way towns were chosen. Colchester is therefore quite an anomaly on this list, so it may easily end up with the lion's share of the 1,700 LED street lights to be installed between January and March next year. I still have the hope that ECC choose carefully and don't burden Colchester with hideously pig-ugly LED lanterns for the next 25 years. We only have a few weeks to wait to see what happens. Photos to follow of course!  :D

* population figures from 2001 census figures listed on Wikipedia.


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PostPosted: Wed Dec 10, 2014 9:30 pm 
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In the "A trip down memory lane: unspoilt lighting installations" thread, David wrote:
The other unspoilt lighting installation I previously posted on UKASTLE II was also from Hertfordshire...

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This is the A1072 Gunnels Wood Road in Stevenage, with its seemingly endless line of GEC turtles!

Well I suppose all good things come to an end.  :( All of Stevenage's A-roads are currently being converted to Urbis LED lanterns controlled by a Telensa Central Management System, and all the other A roads in Hertfordshire will also be converted to LED and the CMS between now and May 2015. From the street lighting enthusiast's point of view, this is a great shame as Hertfordshire, for now, still runs vast quantities of ELECO, GEC, Philips and Thorn 135W and 180W SOX lanterns on its A roads, with many of them surely approaching their half-century. There are plenty of the older and rarer turtles still knocking about too.

Although replacement of all the other street lighting in Hertfordshire with LED lighting is considered uneconomical at the moment, all street lighting casual replacements will be LED from now on, and again be controlled with the CMS.

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These are presumably the Urbis LED lights being installed. The image is from the magazine article below.

•   LEDs magazine report;
•   Conversion timetable, from the Ringway web site;
•   Stevenage's LED replacement schedule, showing the demise of the A1072 Gunnels Wood Road turtles between 2nd and 9th December;
•   Map of Stevenage showing affected roads, from the Ringway site.

In 2010, Hertfordshire County Council decided to convert the majority of its street lighting to part-night lighting, but unlike Essex County Council next door which went for the more expensive Telensa Central Management System, HCC opted for the cheaper system of swapping over the existing dusk-to-dawn one-part cells for part-night lighting cells, which are easy to spot as they have a translucent green cover instead of a translucent clear cover.

Hertfordshire's decision to go with the cell swap saved them money to begin with (£4.3 million to convert 70% of Hertfordshire's 115,000 street lights to the part-night cells, compared to £6.6 million to convert all of Essex's 127,000 street lights to a Centrally Managed System) but it has come to bite them on the backside. This is because the part-night cells rely on ambient light to calculate what time of year it is, and the switch from GMT to BST often coincides with the spring equinox, knocking many of the cells off-balance and plunging large quantities of street lights into darkness. Needless to add, this clock change / equinox situation doesn't happen in Essex, and I'm guessing these embarrassing episodes have persuaded HCC to look at a Central Management System as the way forward.

Last week, Hertfordshire was voted the second-worst authority for street lighting in a public satisfaction poll.

It was beaten into bottom place by Essex.


Last edited by David on Mon Oct 09, 2017 10:46 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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PostPosted: Thu Dec 11, 2014 6:10 pm 
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Alex wrote:
[url=http://www.essexchronicle.co.uk/LED-streetlights-trialed...


An interesting report which in effect, could be cut and pasted for any area in the same situation - you could simply change the place names. It was however nice to see the technical reasons for the new lights in this report, as these are often put down in "layman's terms". Nice to see that high standards are being maintained.

"LED lights improve visibility for drivers at night, as the light emitted interacts with potential obstacles, which makes them easier to see."

Personally, I would have thought that any light source would do that, especially at night!

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PostPosted: Thu Dec 11, 2014 6:15 pm 
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Well, both Essex and Hertfordshire were some of the largest remaining strongholds for SOX in the south east. There aren't many councils in the south east now that haven't been subject to some form of PFI programme or considerable replacements, whether partial or all out.


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PostPosted: Thu Dec 11, 2014 8:07 pm 
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And of course, the part night cells not coming on has nothing to do with the change from GMT to BST. The cell doesn't have a real time clock in it as such, so it doesn't know if its 1800 GMT or 1900 BST.

The actual reason is that at the time of the spring equinox - 21st March, daylight hours equals night time hours. For some silly reason (no doubt faulty software in the microprocessor that generates the switch time from the solar map), the cell gets confused when night hours = day hours, and then doesn't switch on. It just so happens, that sometimes this coincides with the change to BST.

The (non RF/CMS) part night cells used by Wiltshire in my village don't suffer from that problem.


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PostPosted: Mon Dec 15, 2014 9:42 pm 
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sotonsteve wrote:
Well, both Essex and Hertfordshire were some of the largest remaining strongholds for SOX in the south east. There aren't many councils in the south east now that haven't been subject to some form of PFI programme or considerable replacements, whether partial or all out.

The good news is that, even after Hertfordshire's A roads and a few small town centres in Essex are converted to LED, the vast majority of street lighting in both counties will still be SOX.

The Essex LED trial is a drop in the ocean - representing just 1.3% of Essex's street lighting stock, and the county is still installing new SOX casual replacements in existing SOX-lit streets. But having said that, new SOX casual replacements have definitely got thinner on the ground this year compared to 2013, with SON now the light source of choice in Essex for casual replacements. If I was a betting man, I'd say that somewhere between 75 and 80% of the street lighting in Essex is still SOX, and that will trickle down by perhaps up to 2% a year for the forseeable future. In 40 years time, SOX may be as thin on the ground in Essex as MBF is now.

Hertfordshire is pushing the boat out a little further - all the street lighting on the county's A roads represents 11% of their lighting stock, so it represents quite a loss (especially as Hertfordshire's A roads are full to the brim of old SOX lanterns). Hertfordshire still has an enormous SOX legacy, and in the absence of a PFI or a comprehensive LED replacement programme, such a legacy will ordinarily take decades to wipe out under normal circumstances. Having said that, it looks like Hertfordshire are embracing LED with greater enthusiasm that Essex.


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PostPosted: Tue Dec 16, 2014 9:06 pm 
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Interestingly, you'd have thought they'd be prioritising minor roads and footpaths rather than main roads. That said, I've noticed that in Potters Bar they're replacing SOX on minor roads here and there with fluorescent lanterns, the logic of which seems random.


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PostPosted: Thu Dec 18, 2014 7:09 pm 
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Even though both Hertfordshire and Essex are still SOX strongholds, it wouldn't surprise me if this were to rapidly change. Given the significant number of councils embarking on complete overhauls of their lighting stock with new LED lanterns, my bet is that it won't be too long before both follow suit, especially given the poor ratings and controversy surrounding part night lighting.


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