Well I can tell you this, when I was partially sighted the orangey lights
were much much better for me, creating less bleaching and though colours
were odd you could see even in a bit of fog. However the led lights I did
see bfore I lost the central macular kind of hazed up things a bit like a
hard white tube does, the only other thing is that to me at least, flicker
on mains sourced leds is far worse.

I imagine there are pros and cons to all lights though, but it will be
interesting to see what shakes down here. Certainly I believe Surbiton are
not going completely LED yet, not ready they say.
Brian

--
From the Sofa of Brian Gaff Reply address is active
"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...
Has anyone got any long-term experience of LED street light replacements ?
They've just started replacing all the lamposts in my street, with a lot
fewer - and 2 metre taller - lamposts fitted with LED luminaires. We had a
circular from the contractors / council come through the door, which made
some claims about how much money they had already saved by switching off
half or more of all the lights in domestic streets, and just about all of
the lights on the main roads. They then went on to make some further
claims about how much more money they were going to save as a result of
fitting these new LED based lights. Both myself, and my neighbour, who is
an industrial electrician of many years experience, think that the claims
being made are fairly outrageous, and that the numbers, as presented,
don't stack up. The previous lights were low pressure sodium, and when the
guy came to replace a faulty lamp in the one between our houses, my
neighbour asked him what the power rating was. It was 35 watts, which
really isn't a lot. OK, I know that there will be some losses in the
ballast, so let's add another few watts to that and call it 40 watts all
in.

Looking on the 'net, it seems that the LED equivalents start at about 28
watts, with a further 9 watts lost in the driving engine, so 37 watts,
which doesn't seem like a whole bunch different from the sodiums that we
had before. Apparently, the new ones are going to dim down at 2 am, so
that will, admittedly, save a bit more, but it still seems to me that the
figures are being presented in a less-than-straightforward manner, which
seems to be the way of all government propaganda, both central and local,
nowadays.

Last night, they switched on some of the new ones at the other end of the
street, so tonight, I drove round to take a look. My neighbour said that
when his missus came home last night, she reckoned that they had dazzled
her. I could see what she meant. They were actually quite unpleasant to
drive under. It seems that they have given them a wide dispersion angle in
an effort, when coupled with the extra height over the original lights, to
fill in the pools of gloom left by setting fewer of them further apart.
The result is that they shine down into your face from quite a distance
away.

They also claimed that night time colour rendition would be better,
because the replacement lights were going to be white. Well, they *are*
white - sort of. But actually, the light is quite a creamy colour. But
setting that aside, I really don't see why night time colour rendition is
of any importance, over the fact that one of the main reasons that sodium
lighting was first introduced, was because it improved visibility in fog
by a huge amount. I can still remember driving in fog when street lighting
was predominantly by conventional linear white fluorescents, and it was a
much improved situation when the yellow sodium lighting was introduced.

I'm interested in any thoughts, facts, experience or observations that
anyone might have.

Arfa