Besides the monuments, the amazing buildings, the cafes, restaurants, cinemas and museums, the immense beauty of a city is also felt entangled within something so common and simple that hardly anyone would ever care to analyze: its streets. We tend to look at people and sights, and we often neglect the beauty of the streets themselves. Aside from amazing street style, distractions of various kinds and similar, the main reason for the lack of attention to architecture is poor street lighting.
There aren’t a lot of people that think about street lighting, but those whose job is to maintain them and to choose the best option for the highest level of visibility, should definitely update their knowledge in the area and start following the trends.
First and most important feature of them all: cost-efficiency. Pick any corner of the world and every local authority responsible for this issue will tell you the same thing: the less it costs, the better. Add to that way of thinking the fact that we’re so desperately trying to preserve nature and safe the environment, and you have what is today widely known as solar street lighting.
Probably the most energy and cost efficient street lights on the market are the ones that use solar energy to produce the light. Not just that they save so much money from the municipality’s budget, they also preserve the environment and are probably the greenest option there is.
The principal of work is very simple: these lights have a self-contained solar power assembly that runs the fixture. It’s made of solar modules, a vented panel pan made of aluminium, a channel mounting bracket, a battery storage console with sealed batteries and control electronics. There is also an aluminium power bracket for bolting the entire device on a pole or a wall, as needed.
What are the characteristics of fixtures for solar street lighting?
The latest trend in street lights is the usage of LED lights for solar street lighting, since they use less energy and can be designed to suit a very low voltage DC power requirement. Besides the efficiency of 100lm/W, these also offer colour rendering. They start instantly, as opposed to HID or high density discharge lamps which take some time to heat up first. Another great feature of these fixtures is that they’re designed to focus the light they produce in a specially designed beam pattern.
The thing that makes these lamps a lot better than traditional street lights is the way and cost of maintenance, or the weak spot of many maintenance and responsibility service units. The maintenance of traditional street lights costs a lot, since these need re-lamping after only 5000-8000 hours of use. LED fixtures in street lights cost nothing to maintain, since they have an excellent colour rendering index and other highly safe features.
And to make things even better, some of the advanced options of LED street lights have a secondary optics system that along with directing the light in a desired pattern also minimises the black patches across the road.
As you can see, objectives like cost-efficiency and saving the environment when it comes to street lighting are possible. And they start by choosing the right street lights.