23 Feb
2010
23 Feb
'10
1:49 a.m.
That is true, they last longer and would save a heck of a lot of
maintenance... I always thought like 10-15 years ago "when will they
make traffic lights and street lights smart enough that when they fail,
a signal is sent so that someone will come and fix them..." Today its
usually when a traffic signal breaks and someone calls on their cell to
9-1-1 that there is a potential safety hazard, I would assume the
electric co. drives around making inspections looking for dead street
lights. I would think that with their new low power lights there
would then come the eventual Wifi status transmitter that would send out
a functional status of a light, traffic signal, etc that could all come
into a center monitoring station and know when something fails.
I was incorrect on the LED's as you pointed out, the more industrial
type LED's are far more expensive.
Curt
Alexander Schreiber wrote:
On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 05:56:43PM -0500, Curt @ Atari
Museum wrote:
Nice!!! Definitely should see those
nationwide, its ashame they
cost so much which I mean - they are LED's, they are a couple of cents
each, its this all profit gouging on Green Products???
A couple of cents? Yeah, for the small low power (<< 1 W) ones you use
for indicators in electronics or christmas tree lights. The high power
stuff is still rather pricey. While I've no doubt that the manufacturers
are milking every cent of profit they can, those _aren't_ that cheap or
easy to produce, otherwise every semiconductor fablet in china would
make them by the barrel.
Also, make no mistake, the "green" aspect takes a second (or third) seat
to more important aspects when deploying LED for things like traffic
signs and such. Especially for traffic sings, while the LED versions
most likely are significantly more expensive than incandescents, they
are big money savers in maintenance (getting someone up with a ladder to
change bulbs every once in a while ain't that cheap, especially in
places like Switzerland where there _is_ no dirt cheap labor) and
operating costs (power bills). The reduced power consumption of course
lends itself to being toutet as "greener" ;-)
Regards,
Alex.