On Wed, 25 Feb 2015 14:00:19 -0000, Jethro_uk wrote:

On Wed, 25 Feb 2015 13:34:40 +0000, Tough Guy no. 1265 wrote:

Why are councils re-laying all the cables and replacing all the
streetlamp poles for no ****ing reason? All they needed to do was to
change the lamp on the top. What a waste of millions of pounds of
council taxes. The cables worked fine. The poles were in perfect
condition.

Assuming LED lamps draw less power (and weigh less) then there's the
possibility that the council are substituting wires and poles with
something that uses less (or no) metal, and - given the prices decent
quality scrap metal fetches (copper in particular) are using the funds
raised to help pay for the replacements.

I doubt the price is that high that it pays for the cost of having someone with an expensive crane lift go round and swap all the poles. And they're replacing steel painted brown with steel galvanised. I can't see any net gain. As for the wires, the cost of digging up half the pavement and retarmacing it must be far greater than the metal they get from the bigger wires.

Since we had ours done (2+ years ago) and the surrounding neighbourhood,
there has been a marked decrease in light pollution - stars which were
not visible before are just about visible now.

Oh yes, I'm not complaining about the lights, they're much better (only problem is since they're white, I keep mistaking the pools of light for a pool of light from a headlamp and think a cars coming when it isn't). Not sure why they can't evenly illuminate the ground, they seem to have chosen narrow beam spotlights.

--
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic -- Arthur C Clarke