The AM Forum

We drove through a small town near our bustling city of NEW CASTLE Pa.,,,,ELLWOOD CITY.............and  driving into an intersection I noticed the over head street lighting changed to something that resembled Metal Halide lighting. I thought....WOW WHO would put an expensive light light like that up in an intersection??
We were in the city limits and I noticed more of this lighting. Every pole had these lights. You cannot look directly into the dam things BUT bright as HELL and must be new age L.E.D's?????????????
So I quickly turned on the AM radio and tuned for 1710 and not a thought of any hash or trash as I hear with the mercury vapor or Sodium lights. THat is my test freq when looking for that old friend of mine.....the cycling buzzzzz of a street light going on and off every 10 minutes. I'll have to visit again with my SW receiver and scan the Amateur bands for RFI
I found a link to this LED lighting and I'm not dreaming.
I'm impressed!!

http://www.ietcompany.com/case-study-ellwood-city.html

Fred

That's interesting seeing the high initial cost and the way govenrmental entities continually claim to be broke and needy. Let's see how long they last and if it seemd to be a good value.

Why do we think every square foot of land has to be lit up at night?  It's supposed to be dark after the sun goes down.

Not here in Jersey,  all the streets have lights.

For various reasons, people fear the dark...

The power Co. made a deal with Niantic Ct. They installed LED lights in town. the deal is the town pays the same electric rate for a number of years. Then the town owns the new lamps and fancy lamp posts. The building inspector tod me the town invested nothing so they will make out in the long run.

  The city of Canton, Ohio has been making use of LED fixtures for a while. The fellow working on this gave a talk at our local radio club. At that time, they were only using them in selected areas. While I don't remember the numbers, he quoted some real data on what they were saving in power and how long the payback would be to the city. The numbers were impressive.

I like the look of LED lights far more than I do the CFL.  Simple installations like the ceiling lights in our office elevator banks are illuminated better than CFL or tungsten / halogen predecessors that I've seen over the years.

Initial cost will come down with production volume.

The LED lighting industry wants to do away with the "Edison socket" in luminaires because LEDs emit light in basically one direction only and a screw-in connector is not optimum for aiming the 'lamp' properly. The CFL and light bulb industry opposes the elimination of the screw-in socket for obvious reasons.

Patrick,
I know there may be individuals sitting on billions of dollarettes but someone (Uncle Sugar) has to come up with the initial money for start-up of a USA industry. The company making these street lamps is in Ellwood City, Pa. I know whatever Uncle Sam does trickles down to us working folks and we pay in the end. Let's hope there are other start-ups like this and we can reduce the electrical load.
I would love to invest several hundred dollars myself to change from these joke CFLs to LED but things are a little tight for us.
I love the darkness in the country-side but on the other hand, do not want to look like North Korea from a satellite view at night.
Fred

I think I outgrew that phobia at about age 5.




Astronomers - amateur and professional - would love that.

I would settle for a view like the USA was in about 1950.  

They waste all that electricity lighting up the entire countryside all night every night, while trying to force us to convert to crappy CFLs.

I agree with Don about things being over lit. But if you have to over light things at night, LED's might be the way to go. The one thing I'm worried about is if they pulse them to make them dim. We have some LED traffic lights in town, and they are incredible RF noise generators. You can't hear the local broadcast stations in town when you are under one, and they interfere for about a quarter mile up the road in either direction.

Nice sharp square waves driving them obviously. I'm sure that could be tamed with some filtering, but since that would cost the manufacturer a nickle or two, it will never get done. I suspect they must get a waiver on part15 as a traffic safety device because there is no way these things could have ever passed part 15. Oh, wait, BPL did. Right. Nevermind...

Good thought about dimming. After 2AM the city does automatically dim their lights down. It would be interesting to listen to the Ham bands then.

W2VW, Dave, gets horrendous noise from LED stop lights not too far from his QTH. Not goodness.

Fred

Somebody posted a message about just that.  Don't remember if it was on this forum, QRZ.com, eHam or the RFI reflector, but the writer said he had a noise problem with a traffic light at an intersection next to his house.  It was wiping out the entire HF spectrum (or maybe just 160 thru 20).  Anyway, ofter multiple complaints to local officials, and then to the FCC, he finally got an FCC field inspector to the scene.  The inspector took some measurements and said yes, the traffic light was exceeding the Part 15 limit, but he clearly stated that he was not going to take any action against the city or make them do anything about it.

And to think, a few decades ago, the FCC was giving out citations to CBers who clearly gave their legal FCC assigned callsign, but then said something  like "g'bye" at the end of the transmission without uttering the callsign once again, therefore technically not properly identifying.

Fred, I agree with many of those points but the question I have is if the LEDs are worth it considering initial cost, life, and power savings over the life of the luminaire and initial 'lamp'. Most of what I have read tells me that with each technology installed in a luminaire designed for it, that fluorescent (not necessarily compact fluorescent) makes a little more light per watt pushed into the lamp (ballast losses aside). Others have found the opposite answer.

I won't change from CFLs until I see some hours of life guarantees and a real test of lighting so I can see what trickery if any is involved by comparing both, myself. Both industries have come out with various videos and tests showing their own technology to give more light per watt or cost less over time. They can't all be telling the truth.

CFL pushers sometimes tell lies right on the box. I still have a so-called "100 watt equivalent CFL PAR floodlight" sitting here, and I would not use it to illuminate anything larger than an outhouse. I do use a 90W halogen PAR lamp to light up my pickup truck at night so I can see where to aim when the alarm goes off at 3AM. The CFL PAR unit was a real joke in that application. I would try LEDs in that application, but how many 20 degree white LEDs would it take to equal a 90W halogen PAR floodlight? That is a lot of heat to get rid of as well when they are packed so closely together. That's not my problem, it's the engineers' problem, but the LED lamps are still way too expensive right now.

I've had good luck with CFLs as ceiling and reading lamps and enjoy the edison base so I can choose what wattage and technology to use. I have nothing against LED lighting except the cost, and I am even willing to have fewer choices of 'lamp' with LEDs because I can buy the high power luminaire and dim it. If the consumer-type LED luminaires and electronics are made in the USA I would also actually try to buy and use them regardless of the cost. I know of one ballast maker that designs the LED and fluorescent ballasts here and has them all made in China. They have to, to be competitive.

Much of my confusion and I suppose consumer confusion betwen the choices for lighting relates to how the light is measured in two physically different ways and the proponents of each take advantage of that. LEDs are measured in Cd or mCd because of their directional nature, and fluorescent and incandesscents are measured in lumens because of their more omnidirectional patterns. I want to know what I am getting when the luminaire and lamp set cost $120. I'm taking a wait and see approach on it.

Ironic too, that we invest in all this new tech stuff at high cost, meanwhile, the Japanese just developed a much more efficient filament type light bulb filament....

Reminds me of the old chestnut about two astronauts, an American and Soviet, how they meet and the American show the Soviet his pen and explains the amount of research it took to develop a pen that could write in zero g.  The Soviet reply was, "Very nice, but in Russia, we just use pencil"...

Its for your "safety".

Hard to put a finger on exactly when the standard changed, aint it?

I'll have to wait for the prices to come down. A LOT!! $103 for an LED replacement for an R30 style bulb.
http://www.greenlightingsupply.com/Array_Quantum_LED_R30_Medium_Base_Lamp_p/ae26par307qw60.htm?gclid=CKz2urSH06YCFYSK4AodhT5eHQ

they are measuring in comparable lumens.

The heat was surprising!! These newer brighter LED's have a lot of heat going on there. You can touch the assembly, but a lot of heat for those few watts.

Isn't the fact that filament style bulbs emit so much heat (and are therefore inefficient) what started this whole circus in the first place????

In winter, incandescents are 100% efficient.  What energy doesn't convert to light is emitted as heat, which raises the room temperature slightly, causing the heating system thermostat to trip on less often, thereby recuperating the "lost" energy.

Besides RFI, one thing that concerns me about CFLs is fire safety.  I have heard several stories about the electronics in the base of the bulb overheating and even bursting into flame.  I would not want to use one in recessed lighting or in a ceiling fixture mounted right on the wood surface, unattended.

I just read in the newspaper this morning that California is planning to phase out incandescents a year ahead of the federal mandate.  They are also imposing energy standards on TVs.  Now, I might go along with the latter.  The high-consuming TVs are the ones with plasma screens, which reportedly generate ungodly amounts of RFI as well as the equivalent of a small electric space heater.  Anything to discourage or outright ban those things, under no matter what pretext, should be welcome news to the amateur radio community.

I tried a halogen replacement incandescent bulb a few years ago.  Like CFLs, it was supposed to be long life, but with more light output than  regular incandescent bulbs.  The thing had a very thick glass envelope which made it heavy, and it ran extremely hot to the touch.  After a few months, about the same length of time it takes to burn out a modern day flimsy-filament incandescent, the bulb blew out like a flash-bulb.  When I examined it, the thick glass envelope was cracked near the base.  The damned thing was expensive - about $5 for a 100-watt size.

It would be interesting to see if the new Japanese high-efficiency incandescents are any better.

A couple of years ago I was looking for a ceiling fan light fixture. None of the ones I could find in the store had the standard "Edison" screw-in base, but instead, they took the so-called "candelabra" base bulbs, which cost several times what you would pay for a standard bulb.  I was told that standard light bulb bases were outlawed in those fixtures, to prevent the customer from exceeding the safety limit by using over-sized bulbs (> 60 watt) in the fixture.  I ended up fabricating something out of parts from a crapped-out ceiling fan fixture and another ceiling light fixture.

That is what happens when politicians try to legislate things they just don't understand... which happens to be nearly everything anyway.

So we get forced to buy Chinese junk that will burn your house down, and there is no one going to be held accountable.

About a year ago I purchased a package of 60W incandescent lamps from China-Mart. The failure mode for every one of them was a short, sufficient to trip a 20A breaker. There was little else on the same circuit. I had never experienced that with a made-in-USA lamp.

I have begun stocking up on heavy duty incandescents, Hopefully I can hold out until the madness passes. 

Makes me want to start burning Whale oil for light, and wear a nice sealskin coat to stay warm...