When it comes to picking the best municipal outdoor lighting, the struggle is real. You need to get something that is low-maintenance, but also something that won’t break down after the first heavy rain. You need a system that is low-cost and simple, but high-quality and durable.
Sounds like a fable, doesn’t it? Well, times are changing. Now, there are ways for you to bring light into your city without leaving your residents without food or water for the next five days.
Converting to LED Lights
We need lighting to stay safe. It may be that one night you had too many martinis to drink and you needed a clear path, or there was a shady person that has been tailing you for the last ten minutes. You need that light to at least give you a sense of safety.
Bear this in mind: street lighting will spread across the entire city, with one light placed every few meters. That means a lot of street lights per street and per city.
The problem is that every city has its own budget, so the more we spend on a certain issue, the less we can spend on other issues. In this case, the more we spend on light, the less we can spend on public transportation and the head of the city will surely find a way to cover that gap. As a result, say hello to pricier bus passes. If you want to learn more about energy efficiency and public lighting, check out this blog post.
This is why increasing number of cities are switching to LED lights when it comes to public lighting. As opposed to traditional lighting, they bring a longer list of benefits – and you won’t even have to do maintenance checks so often. Here are the advantages that are likely to interest you:
- • Reduced energy use: Traditional street lights don’t really know when to stop, so they basically “spray” energy all over the place. LED lighting in combination with smart technology – motion sensors and dimming control reduce energy consumption only to what is needed – cutting off the waste energy by 50-80%.
- • Reduced energy costs: This one is directly tied to the one above, in the sense that the less energy you use, the lower budget you will have to allocate for lighting. Besides using less energy which will cost less public money, LED lights use the amount of energy needed more efficiently than traditional lights.
- • Reduced wasted lighting and light pollution: Traditional sodium based lights can go in all kinds of different directions – illuminating areas that don’t even need to be illuminated (such as the night sky). LED lights, however, directly illuminate what it’s needed – such as the street or the sidewalk. This way, energy won’t be wasted, and you will be able to save your dollars. LED lights not only have a better color rendering, but they focus all that energy into one clear point offering therefore, a better light quality.
Municipality street lighting is something that requires your undivided attention. As the head of the city, you need to ensure that your residents feel safe and are not harassed financially because of your decisions. So far, the only way of saving onlighting budget and cost while still maintaining the efficiency is by going from traditional to LED.
Opting for Solar Street Lights
Once more, evolution paves the way for progress – and with the apparition of LED lights, people started asking themselves: how can we make this more energy efficient? Can we reduce the lighting costs even more?
It’s understandable why we would want more efficiency when it comes to street lighting. Compared to the last couple of years, there are more houses now; streets are bigger, and, therefore, cities are larger. If we don’t find something to cut the costs, well… future generations might start having a problem.
This is exactly what paved the way for solar street lights. What better way to save energy than to use the exact thing that Mother Nature gave you? Exactly: the Sun. Here’s why investing your lighting budget into solar street lights might be a very good decision:
- It’s a long-term solution: As long as you have the Sun, you’ll have light for your cities. You will no longer have to rely on generators to power your the street lighting. You have a powerful renewable energy generator right above your head; and unless it explodes (in which case, we all die), we will always have a source of energy to illuminate our streets at no cost.
- You don’t have to pay for the energy: You don’t have to pay for sun rays. The beauty of smart solar street lights is that they collect solar energy and store it for later use (in solar battery system) – therefore, the cost of solar street lights will be equal to zero. Once night falls, the stored energy will be accessed and released, so you will no longer have to tap into the city generators.
- Low maintenance: The most annoying thing about light bulbs is that every few months, they will expire. And when they expire, they will literally go “boom,” in which case you will need someone to go do some maintenance on them. A smart solar street light will use solar panels and high-quality LED lights that can be controlled and maintained from a distance with a help of remote monitoring system. Just one quick fact, by having remote control in place, almost 80% of malfunctions of your street lights can be identified and repaired online without the need to go to the specific location.
Basically, by switching to solar LED lighting, you make a long-term investment for your city: no electricity costs, performance reliability, relatively quick ROI (Return on Investment) and conservation of additional clean energy.
Final Thoughts
There is one surefire way of saving energy and money on lighting – and that’s by ditching the traditional light bulbs. Thankfully, with energy costs skyrocketing more and more, people are also getting inventive with their energy-saving solutions.
This is why today, we have LED lights and smart solar LED lights; two convenient ways of getting energy at little to no cost, and with barely any need for maintenance.
We are providing you a free copy of our latest e-Book where you will find all the answers about solar street lights and how to start implementing them.