The LED's Challenge to High Pressure Sodium
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- čas přidán 18. 06. 2018
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Now that we know why street lights are orange, let’s look at whether or not they should still be so. The answer isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. Although newer technology seems to surpass HPS in nearly all respects, there are still considerations to be made.
Link to the Previous Video:
• The High Pressure Sodi...
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Sources (lot’s of great ones!):
Lighting Research Center study comparing induction and metal halide sources to HPS:
www.lrc.rpi.edu/researchAreas/...
US Department of Energy’s information on blue light sources in street lighting:
www.energy.gov/sites/prod/fil...
University of Pittsburgh’s environmental assessment of LEDs (in case you are worried about the extra e-waste compared to the mercury and sodium):
www.sciencedaily.com/releases...
Some general info on spectral sensitivity of the human eye:
light-measurement.com/spectra...
Basic info on light pollution (including relative impacts on sky glow) came from everyone’s favorite reliable source of knowledge:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_p...
Spec sheet for the Cree LED
api.icentera.com/v2/getfile.as...
Product overview:
lighting.cree.com/products/out...
More info on spectral misalignment:
www.patmullins.com/sodiumpollu...
Where Dr. Alan Lewis’ research is cited:
www.thelindy.com/uploads/Shoul...
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I prefer HPS lights because it makes it easier to fall asleep when I'm driving. I like to be well rested when I arrive at my destination.
kk shill, it's your useless soul you're throwing away............
@@coolboy5428 it so obviously is a joke
Steepyboi YT my mind is fuckin blown at how dumb people must be to miss a joke that obvious.
I'd prefer to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandpa, not screaming in terror like the other people in his car.
@@JohnnyTromboner
*Driver falls asleep*
*People in Car Screams*
*Running in the 90s starts to play*
Now if only they'd ban those huge LED billboards that are so bright they almost blind you...
I don't understand why they don't pair the LED billboards with ambient light sensors to dim them when it's darker. They truly are blinding.
Cost. If I'm an advertiser, why would I pay money for my ads to be less visible?
SentsuizanXS There is a difference between blinding somebody and being visible. Sometimes I cannot even look at LED billboards when my eyes have adjusted to the dark. So I suppose being too bright has the opposite effect, at least on me.
Besides, how much do you think a simple ambient light sensor and brightness adjusting software would cost in comparison on the whole billboard? If anything, they would save some on the energy costs. Your argument makes no sense.
SentsuizanXS I actively ignore such LED signs, they're an eyesore. I will not view any advertisement placed there.
I can't even look at them. I don't know what they're advertising, not that I'd care anyway.
I loved the mellow glow of HPS. It's unnatural spectrum didn't attempt to imitate daylight and it had moody, romantic quality in the rain and fog.
LED's make my residential street feel like a car dealership or grocery store.
I'm running 2700K LEDs for a couple years now at home, and so far it's quite comfortable. It all comes down to the temperature of the LEDs.
Yeah. Literally the one and only thing that can entirely ruin the aesthetics of a town. The road I always bicycled to the town center is permanently ruined by these bright, white LEDs. There was a really special, nostalgic atmosphere. Not anymore... I blame the engineers and town planners who only look at the numbers of what is most cost efficient, and take the first LED option they find with no forethought. Aesthetic value can't be measured in money...
It’s unnatural like a transgender voice.
Yes! Blue-white LEDs should be banned.
@@goldbullet50 yes it can, it's merely a question of what you're willing to pay
There's a good reason those old HPS lights were replaced but I really do miss that warm orange glow across the city at night, as a very young lass in the '00s. The light bathed everything in that orange glow (and it really did travel far) and I love warm lighting like that. It's pleasant and soothing.
As someone who struggles to stay awake driving at night "pleasant and soothing" are suboptimal!
@@GreenCurryiykyk Pleasant and soothing are better than too painful to open your eyes. That's the problem I have with the new LED fixtures.
Theres one hps light left near me, its on the entrance to my street, I love it
Yeah same, it had a beautiful colour and it does feel like it travels much further
@@johnschroeder3072yes. led lights destroy your eyes
Only thing i miss about the orange sodium lamps is up north here, the light would bounce off the icy/snowy ground and give low hanging clouds a pretty bright orange glow. So walking at night you had the orange streetlights, orange snow covering, and an orange glow on the cloudcover. It truly felt like walking through a surreal, trippy dreamscape.
Chyeeeaaah, live for that, though here in Florida, the hazy overcast goes up in orange, red, and purple. You've got this very regal purple sky, with light red and orange clouds.
Agreed
Well, so LED street lights might be a legitimate excuse to have a wee bit of shrooms more often. :-)
Now it's blue and it keeps me from sleeping!
That experience gave birth to many poems/Haikus we might have never read.
LEDs make me feel like im driving through the refrigerator section
new level in new racing game
Sir this is a wendy's
Did those metal halide lamps the parking lots used to have make you feel the same way?
I think the lights of fridge bulbs have a slightly higher blue tinge to them than normal to make the colors of food within them pop out a bit more, and a lot of street LEDs may have a similar quality. I remember replacing a bulb that had burnt out and finding that it had a distinct blue filter over it
I think it feels like an emergency room
I recently had an issue with LED street lighting. In the rain, led’s are too bright and the road was too reflective so I couldn’t see any lines. I had no idea where to drive besides not into head on traffic. Terrifying!
Have you tried polarized or the yellowish anti-glare lenses for night driving?
When I was younger I loved night highway driving, now that my eyes have aged, it's not so fun especially in the rain. Time to acknowledge that I'm getting old.
If only we used PC Amber LEDs. It provides the functions of normal LEDs with the aesthetics of HPS lights. Seriously why don't we use them
@@paulgilbert5278 They're not as efficient as the white LEDs.
How come?
@@azurplex I’m only 23 so hopefully that’s not my issue 😂
But the blue light also interferes with night vision, so when you leave the well lit area you will not be able to see as well as you would with an amber color. also when it is foggy the blue light makes it much worse. I have had to slow down at the lights because it looks like a solid wall of fog that I can't see past.
You should probably get that checked or something since im pretty sure it doesn’t take more than 4 seconds for your eyes to readjust
@@orangequill1645 Try telling that to submarine lighting designers, they switch to red light at night in some areas of the boat where people are likely to have to either go on watch or view through the periscope. This is all night, not just a few seconds before, because achieving full night vision takes much longer than you have suggested.
@@chrishartley1210 its not full night vision,since im assuming they going thorough a brightly lit city and has car headlights on
very very good point
@@orangequill1645 Bold assumption that the whole city is well lit.
I think one good option would be a mixture of color temperatures. In residential areas, like neighborhoods and apartment complexes, lower temperature or dynamic light fixtures could be used to avoid disturbing the circadian rhythms of people in the places where they actually sleep. For non-residential areas, like commercial districts and highways, higher temperature lights could be used as the benefits in efficiency and safety might outweigh the disruptions in circadian rhythms. The disruption might even be beneficial as reducing melatonin outputs in drivers on long trips means fewer people falling asleep at the wheel and therefore a much safer environment.
Yeah, I also don't see why the circadian disruption is a bad thing.
I wouldn't want myself/others to fall asleep while driving on the highway.
SibaNL: It would be a bad thing in residential areas where street light filters into homes.
@@benj1008 Curtains. Also, I said highway.
@@SibaNL Why are you commenting in that case if you are just saying what the original poster said?
@@CanadianCCP Just adding my opinion. Dum dum.
8:05 As someone who lives across the street from a luxury car dealer, believe me, I know all about light pollution.
Haha, once upon a time I lived a couple of blocks away from one. A hurricane knocked out my power for over a week in the summer. I was dying. But the dealership was fine. All I could see from my backyard was this glowing beacon in the sky. Their towering American flag cutting through the darkness, taunting me.
I bought a house on the outskirts of town, overlooking a field. Then they built a bus depot right over the far side of the field. Then, a few years later, they decided that they had to have better perimeter lighting. The lighting is well over 100m from the house, but it casts crisp shadows on the side. At least it’s blue-ish. I moved.
I once lived across from a 24/7 McDonald's. Had to get blackout curtains. It was bad for many reasons.
Fun fact: if you get to know the McDonald's staff well enough they'll let you walk up and order through the drive-thru window when your too drunk to drive.
Lol
As someone living right across even 3 grand malls with all of them having LED media screens with constant changing pictures and probably illuminating with 60-70 illuminated LED signs at night I really understood that light pollution was a very serious thing.
The WHO must issue directives about it. We ban smoking everywhere, but constant light torture might be even more harmful in the end permanently damaging mental and eye health leading to changing life patterns.
The golf course near my house replaced their parking lot’s HPS lights with even taller LED fixtures. They are so bright that they are blinding me in my room in the winter when the tree leaves no longer block the light. They are about a 1/2 mile from us. It’s ridiculous.
Shoot 'em
The problem is more a failure of them to use proper reflectors and baffling, a case of lazy contractors and uncaring owners.
You should consider talking to a lawyer to see if you have a ground for a lawsuit against them
This is more a case of them not installing the LEDs properly, something they could get away with when using HPS because it doesn't seem very bright during night time, but white LEDs are going to be bright enough to cause a problem.
This is more of an issue the type and brightness of the light they used ratehr than the technology themselves. sounds like they didn't do their research
They have been moving to led street lighting here in Australia, and being someone who drives home after dark every day I actually found the highways that have led lighting to be a higher risk of animal strike. The checkerboard effect generated by the bright led illumination directly below the street light that sharply drops off creates dark patches between the lights. The effect of these dark patches are increased by the intensity of the LEDs as you pass by them. I find my eyes can't adjust quickly enough to deal with the brightness from the led vs the dark shadows generated between. Although the sodium lights were a dimmer light, they did diffuse more evenly along the road and allow you to see all the way along the highway (all be it at a dimmer light) without the blind spots that kangaroos seem to like to stop in. I imagine the safest thing would be the brighter LEDs but at half the distance apart to light the dark patches between. This would double the number required and most likely negate the energy savings though.
Wow
I saw some pedestrian street lamps replaced by LED near where I live too. They created the checkerboard effect you mentioned and it's annoying. But for that part of problem I would blame the fixture design though. An LED lamp *could* be in arbitrary light spread angle if designed well. Another concern is they replaced orange low pressure sodium lamps with white LED, which doesn't match the surrounding and bad for people's sleep.
That's more of an optic flaw than a flaw of the LED. There's a lot of cool stuff you can do with an LED with different types of optics. Wide beam, narrow, circular, square, oval and so on. He actually briefly mentions this in the video.
in Winnipeg Canada we changed almost ALL of our street lights to LED in ONE GO and that issue is VERY noticeable NOW compared to the HPS / induction units they replaced
the change up happened in districts in town and BEFORE they were 1/2 way done the NEW units started failing and they stopped and replaced the FAILING units with a different design that was NO better up and down the street but was FAR better sideways ACROSS the street but those LAMPS are NOW failing and they will eventually replace them with another different unit
@@jasonriddell I'm sure even with its failure rate, which will improve with the technology, LED lamps are very cost-effective because of the power they save. At ~80 watts for an LED vs. hundreds of watts for sodium, they pay for themselves in no time. A city can't ignore the electricity savings. Especially for a province like Manitoba that gets a lot of its income by hydro exports to the US, where it helps reduce burning coal.
I'm a six year veteran of the U.S. Navy, (89' to 95'), and I can say from experience that the Navy uses Low Pressure Sodium lights on it's ships' weatherdecks, (the external areas of the ships), for the reason that the near monochromatic low wavelength of light emitted is less likely to be seen by potential enemies at a distance. So LPS lighting is specifically used by the military as a "stealth" security measure... Just an interesting fact worthy of note...
Intereasting
Sounds like this goes toward the sky glow issue.
@@coopergates9680 nah sky glow pretty much only exist in large cities. a few ships blasting light into the sky in the middle of the ocean is pretty much nothing compared to the lights reflected off the ground in a city
@@ipodtouchiscoollol the idea tho is that anything contributing to sky glow in a big city would be easily spotted in the middle of the ocean
Can't you compensate for that with a red LED or white LED with a filter?
My city is switching to LED lighting. They chose a yellowish LED light. Streets are way better illuminated, and, as a driver, I quickly noticed that I can clearly see crosswalks and objects way further away than with sodium lights.
Yes sir,
If you don't mind me asking, what city do you live? My city has installed Cool White i.e. 4000+ K LEDs across the board and I hate it. The Streets appear to be darker and some of the lighting is too bright.
In arctic areas, sodium lamps are often used because you can better see and orient in horrible snowstorms with the yellowish light. Cold blue light tend to fade out in a sort of lighthbouble around the lightfixture. But even the northern cities of greenland are switching to cold blueish light.
@@PJ-kj3ef This is why LED is so amazing. You can control the colour temperature far easier and use what works best in any given area. You can even change it dynamically if you want, budget allowing.
Here in my city in LA County they installed 3500k led streetlights and they are SO much better it’s insane
they add a really bad glare on the windscreen when it rains (pretty much blinds you)
One advantage of HPS street lighting that I’ve personally noticed is that the light is easier to differentiate from other light sources (eg., headlight beams).
Incident light from LED streetlights can make incident light from vehicle LED headlight beams less perceptible/practically indistinguishable (assuming you can’t also see the actual headlights, themselves).
That's a very very good point
HPS lamps have a great advantage over LEDs: monochromatic sodium light (longer wavelengths in general) penetrates fog far FAR better than cold LED one. I have an area near my house where part of the street is illuminated by old sodium and part by LEDs. The difference is dramatic with just a little bit of fog. Kicker: the FOG lights in older cars used yellow tinted bulbs because of this effect.
@luis_gustta Ha, interesting, I'll look into that, but the principle remains the same, the longer wavelength the better fog penetration.
Just use a longer wavelength LED. Red LEDs exist.
My city installed LED lights on the walkway alongside our canal, That we live aside.
And now it’s daytime 24/7
use blackout curtains - super useful regardless of the type of outdoor lighting type if you have trouble sleeping
My city of Ottawa is almost finished should be done by 2020 I think by this month they should be done all side streets done main streets and traffic poles to go
@@GiorgosKoukoubagia That doesn't help if you have to be outside for any reason at night, whether it's driving or anything else. It only takes a small dosage of bright blue light for your circadian rhythm to be disrupted and you end up with essentially the same problem as jet lag. Sleep deprivation is a society-wide problem that gets little coverage because pretty much everyone is sleep deprived and think it's normal and acceptable, when really it shouldn't be.
That's true @Joel White , perhaps we should try to find out a middle ground between ease of sleep and eco savings. By the way, I recently saw another research about a very similar topic: how red-ish light apps for screens (pcs and smartphones) may actually make us more aware instead of sleepy, since they look more like the sun. I guess more research is needed
@@GiorgosKoukoubagia I think that's the real takeaway from this video... there is no perfect solution and it's always going to be a location-specific compromise
Disrupting sleep for drivers seems like a good thing to me. I'd rather drivers be more alert.
Great ! we'll get right on installing one outside your bedroom window.
R Smith
Bruh just get window curtains
It's not instant, you just won't be able to sleep when you get home.
👍 In Russia, we already have our own driver sleep disruption technology™, known as Potholes™. It'll disrupt you so much, you'll get hemorrhoids.
Legosheep I came to say the exact same thing! I don't see a downside at all! Even if there are noticable side-effects to non-drivers and their sleeping patterns, then why not use LEDs on roads where reaction times is most needed _and_ there are fewer non-drivers, like highways?
It's not only about rhythm disruptions in humans, but it will also effect the biorhythm of animals living the surrounding area as well. Not sure if any studies have been done on how this impact bird migration, or the effect on nocturnal species.
Pretty sure those species were already chased away when those roads were paved…
Multiple studies have been done on many animal and insect species.
High Temp blue light has a negative impact on virtually all of them.
I used to love watching hundreds of Orb Weaver Spiders spin their webs every night.
Street lighting changed to Blue LEDs. The spiders are virtually non-existent now.
Like my Alma Maters mascot. The Beaver. Spiders are also Nature's Engineers.
Holy crud! Seeing your pic of the white lights made me realise my city just did a terrible job of installing them. They have chosen a weird, ghostly grey flickering thing with a tiny circle of coverage. Didn't realise LED street lights could enable you to see
I would prefer 5000K LED lights in highways, they do provide better visibility, keep drivers awake. But in residential area, 2700k is preferred. Its easier on the eyes, wont affect sleep cycles.
5000K lights keep drivers awake after they get home and in bed. The next day they are sleep deprived. I think LED lights with the color of incandescent lights would provide the public with the greatest overall satisfaction.
@@men2dewy most people won't go to sleep the second they get home.
It also means that there is a social aspect to it. If we have the choice, we should sleep at night, not drive. It's also about adapting our work schedules, for example. But then, there's winter...
I personally suscribe to the idea that lighting should change as night progresses and was thinking about it before he mentioned the reader's suggestion, cooler as the sun goes down (bow to the mighty Earth, sun), more moderate until midnight, when street lighting goes 3000K. Then as we get closer and closer to the morning break it gets cooler again.
LED street lamps suck in rain and foggy conditions. If it is snowing good luck.
He is the type of person you'd want on your city council make infrastructure decisions. Sadly the public sector isn't a place for thinkers like him.
Whereas the private sector is well known for their focus on anything but price lol
Not especially, though the guy is definitely much more conversed in this matter than most of our apologies of electric engineers and city planners, he still considers 4000K is OK. 4000K is not OK. 2200 K (HPS has 1900 K and even more red than yellow) is the maximum for outdoor public lighting.
@@warden9876
I'm pretty sure I've seen cool temperature lighting on California freeways and highways. So I don't think your standards are universal. That being said, residential area street lights being primarily composed of low temperature lighting is something I can see being beneficial for human sleep and comfort.
In my experience, while the illumination immediately beneath blue/white street ighting is excellent, its lateral spread is very poor. The pools of light cast by street light stands are therefore very small, with large areas of virtual darkness between one lamp-post and the next. In contrast, sodium vapor lamps seem to cast a wider beam of usable light with no truly dark areas to negotiate.
@@liam3284 Thanks for your comment. One would have thought the manufacturers of the lamp-posts would have designed a suitable lens, having done everything else! TBH, I think the light units I've experienced, like those you have seen, incorporate a simple glass plate, as the light itself is clearly visible from beneath the fitment.
This is entirely a matter of the shape of the particular fixture and bulb. It has nothing to do with whether it's sodium vapour or LED, or their colour.
Maybe a good course of action would be to finish using the existing stock of sodium lightbulbs and then switch to 2700K-3000K color temperature LEDs when they run out, seeing that LEDs are still improving.
Yeah, that's what they're doing here in Australia.
Behind the scenes that’s what lighting manufacturers are doing. It’s becoming less viable/sensible for us to carry HPS and other HID fixtures so we discontinue new families of HPS lighting basically every quarter with the intention being able to eventually remove all HID options from our catalog. LED has advanced to the point where really there is not enough demand for HID/HPS to support the production with our limited resources so I suspect there will be almost zero newly manufactured HPS fixtures on the market within the next half decade.
Yeah they do that here. A bit annoying when every other lamp is LED or te old lamps, looks bad when they mix them.
use lava lamps for street lights..the best and coolest looking solution
I LOVE GONGS My Gong Songs and the most inefficient
Potato Gamer lmfao
You must really like gongs
The fixture would support LED house lighting
#truth
In my town the local authority have replaced a lot of road lights with LED with motion sensors on, the lights sit at around 20-30% when no one is around but when they detect cars or walkers they light up to full brightness about 6 lights in front and 3 lights behind the cars. It is supper fun to sit and watch.
That's awesome, what city is that in?
Am in UK
My council has been changing all the lights to led.
They are a lot brighter.
In my town some underground tunnels also use the motion sensors. They sit at about 40% and then brightness fully when you approach them (few meters). I did pass some tunnels few times and I was thinking I am hallucinating because the change in brightness was slow and wall are bright white so other lamps were make the whole tunnel lit. But few days ago, I did confirmed they do change intensity depending on traffic. Very effective at late night with low traffic places. This particular case do save a bit of power, but doesn't contribute to light pollution, but similar tech could be used in other places.
The LED Streetlights at a parking lot for a hospital near me do this. They run at a lower output until someone parks or walks under them that they switch to full brightness.
Cool! That should be the standard. With LED speed, maybe even zero when no one is around.
But that is way cool!
Maybe I’m a little old school but as a kid I really liked the old school Mercury vapor lights. There are even some isolated street areas now that still have MV lights and it gives of a neat moonlight glow. Now they are seen more in private property or parking lots.
I hope you can do a Mercury Vapor lamp video! They were the first original HID after all
That would be great. MV lights are still my favorite, tbh.
100% nailed that description! 😁
Happy New Year!
Mercury Vapor Bulb on the Ranch hasn’t been changed in 40 years! 3 photocells and a couple bug dust.
@@andrewpeyton5167what "Ranch"?
@@denverdubois5835same
My town recently replaced all the street lights with LED downlights and the difference it made to the night sky was awesome.
My town did this a few years ago.
People had your outlook on it. Not anymore.
Now it's a FUCKING nightmare.
When those lights go bad, they flicker like strobe lights. In my area they seem to go about a year & then a LOT of them go bad.
Get 2, 3, or more in a row (yes I regularly drive through 3 in a row every time I come home from work at 10pm) & the strobe effect is ABSOLUTELY deadly & terrifying to deal with.
The 3 in a row that I go through are on a steep hill that I'll bet is steeper than your imagination will give it when you imagine what "steep" is.
There's a bend. It's not sharp, but the strobe effect from 3 lights throws off where you think the bend even is. Add cars coming the other way with that effect. Add winter time with snow, ice, rain & voila! Happy times huh?!?!
That's just 1 area that's like this.
I go through a school zone that's got 2 lights out that strobe. That's also part of my way home from work. It's at a traffic light so the ENTIRE intersection flickers non-stop & blinds you over & over again & then you'll get the green to go & now you're moving but you've got serious night blindness from the bright light burned into your sight.
These lights are 100% ABSOLUTE GARBAGE & they've increased the likelihood of fatal accidents IMMEASURABLY in my city.
@@ClickClack_Bam We installed quality lamps so not an issue for us if that is what you are waffling on about in your silly rant.
@@mariemccann5895 "Silly rant"? You must be a dumb ass liberal lol.
You ACTUALLY took my town's bad experience with these lights as personal!
Wow.
Don't step on your other foot when crossing the street today! Sorry if I offended you when completely talking about my town not your town. Hopefully one day you can realize what a normal conversation looks like but I DOUBT it. Most liberals NEVER do.
@@ClickClack_Bam Ah didums, can't deal with the truth. Grow up.
@@mariemccann5895 What truth is that?
TF are you talking about?
I remember so many times driving so late at night during winter, I thought the sun was already rising but it was actually just city lights lighting up the clouds above.
A system of well built nether portals is much faster.
They should use glowstone instead of LED
Actually the charcoal torches have the best Illumination-Price ratio
@@chesteramstrong2592 Nah, Galacticraft floodlights are so powerful they scare the mobs away.
Just ramp up brightness to 100% in settings
I love youtube
Where else can you see a video where a dude talks about lamps with references to scientific studies and stuff, AND it's done in professional but also entertaining manner
Totally. While television shows have to simplify and over-dramafy their shows to be consumable to a wide audience, CZcams connects creators with the exact audience who'd be interested in a subject. A CZcams creator can do well with an audience of 100,000 followers, and CZcams connects them with 100,000 people who share that exact preference. The drawback is that viewers become separated into their unique areas of interest and we can't relate to eachother in conversation.
Channels like this deserve to be considered scientific study channels. This whole episode is basically a whole study.
@Jeffrey Tinsley - Real studies are done on paper, paper which you can print out and hold, or put in a book or journal or publication.
RubalCava yeah absolutely but who says studies can’t be video journalism or something along the lines of that. Yeah it’s hard to believe I can see that but it’s hard to believe it if it were just written down. So why not video studies?
I'd like, but it's at 69.
I drive container cranes and when you're trying to discern between different shades of rust at 100 ft, HPS wins hands down!
Here in England, most local councils have now switched street lighting to LED, and I hate it.
The lights are so bright that it can be really hard to actually distinguish oncoming traffic.
Conversely, the widespread application of equally blinding LED headlights has meant that they just haven’t bothered replacing sodium lights in more remote areas and just switched them off instead.
Also, the nice yellowy orange glow just looks better. But the cheaper operation of LED lights means that they’re coming for the vintage gas lamps next.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk
That ending. Oof.
There was a lot to unpack for this video (more than I thought!) so it ended up on the lengthy side. Still, I hope you find it enlightening!
Blue Wavelength lights are proven to reduce crime rates.
@Technology Connections: I enjoyed the series and look forward to more street furniture episodes.
The script could be condensed a bit more, but overall a nice video and an interesting topic. Cheers!
"Enlightening" :>
I personally don't like warm white anywhere, to me it just looks old and out of place, a proper cool white bulb makes everything look a little more futuristic.
I'm gonna miss that lovely iconic yellow glow from lamps when they're gone. It gave the city/streets an otherworldy quality that was exciting and welcoming.
Walking at night is going to have the harsh feel of going into an office building.
High C.R.I. LEDs...like 90+ are very nice on the eyes. NOTHING like the stark white/blue of fluorescent and MH. COBs and Quantum Boards.
Theomite The lights on the street where I live were changed to what I assume is LED fairly recently. It doesn't seem harsh to me and it's actually easier now to see versus the sickly, ineffective yellow glow of the lights that were here before that actually made it harder for me to see what was in/near the road. The lights I HATE are super-bright headlights on cars.
They have started replacing our and they are HORRIBLE :( They are actually too bright when driving.
To me it was gloomy and unwelcoming
One thing I have not seen mention of re the LEDs: the effect on driving safety for older drivers. Cataracts normally develop in the eyes between 40-50 and become symptomatic after 60. The glare caused by these blue/white LEDs from non-diffused LED street lamp lenses can be extraordinary -- like looking into an arc lamp or welder's torch. With early or late cataracts, the bluish light from these high-intensity LED fixtures becomes scattered by the lens within a catarcatous eye and starbursts and other visual abberations result -- unlike with the more diffused, orange light emminating from older HPS lamps with diffuser lamp covers. Believe me -- I know because I have seen the difference with my own eyes.... This cannot be considered to be "safer" even with the slightly brighter roadways that may result from bluish LED street lights. For such drivers -- and there are hundreds of millions out there -- it may very well be the opposite. And those are the drivers who need the most help.
TC: "If someone can point to some verified, peer-reviewed research supporting this, and not a dodgy website, I'll consider changing my stance..."
That, amongst many other notable qualities, is why YT and the world need more folks like you. Keep up the excellence!
One of my absolute worst experiences I ever had with driving at night, was in a car that had all BRIGHT BLUE instrument lighting... I could barely see the road. Who comes up with such a dumb idea...
Satan and Agenda 21
Didn't it have a switch, for turning down the brightness?
That could be another topic for a video; what color of instrument lighting is best for night driving.
Thats user error. My 2014 chrysler 300 is all blue and its perfect at night and blue keeps me calm. My 2016 mustang gt has adjustable guages. I can pick any color and i always pick blue. I do set my interior to red though because i like red n blue but where my eyes are looking at i personally prefer blue and you can adjust the brightness of just about all guages like other ppl said so thats on you if you couldnt see.
@@digitalrailroader green?
Considering this is a 3 year old video, I would like to see a revisit to the topic since now we have warm light LEDs, which I think would be the best middle ground between these sodium lamps and the pure white LEDs
The local council removed all of the HPS the lights down our road, and replaced half of them with LED arrays. On one hand it's good because they removed one which was right on the edge of our driveway, making access quite tricky unless you got the angle just right (although it did stop people parking across the drive, so swings and roundabouts...), also obviously much lower energy usage which is always a good thing.
Unfortunately they are much brighter/harsher than the old ones, so we had to get blackout blinds :(
Ours got replaced some time ago (almost approaching 10 years!) and while it was nice that they moved the lamp posts away from the pavement edge, they also reduced their quantity, which leaves massive gaps of poor lighting between the posts. Interestingly enough, a "main"- ish road got orangey LED replacements, whereas the side roads have the white ones - wonder why they went with that?
Surely the sleep disruption effect of LEDs is a benefit to safety especially on highways since falling asleep at the wheel or other drowsiness is a significant danger of nighttime driving.
Yup that does seem more of an advantage on highways especially as even where they go into cities they tend to be surrounded by commercial or industrial land uses. So the negative effects would be lessened to my mind as they are not in residential areas which are perhaps better to continue using sodium lamps, low speeds gives drivers more time to react to hazards on residential streets too.
It’s absolutely a great idea to have leds lights but as someone with a stigmatism I can tell you I avoid my mirrors an when someone is close behind I physically have to slow down to a under 30 because the light is so bright I can’t see the road I’ve found myself pulling over to stop because of a splitting headache an nearly crashing because I couldn’t see out my mirrors to notice another car I find driving at night especially for me has become extremely dangerous because I straight up loose the ability to drive with out being blinded
@@timmy5949 save up for a car with automatic dimming side and rearview mirrors
People driving aren't the only ones affected by street lighting.
@@timmy5949 it seems it also disturbed your ability to punctuate.
The possibility to dim LED lights is a huge bonus. I have seen *street lights* in resedential areas here in Austria which have a *motion sensor built in.* They must be *using radar* to do that. They react to pedestrians and cyclists as well. They get alot brighter when you approach them and dim down again after 30 seconds to a minute. This not only saves energy, but reduces light polution (obviously) and will extend the lifetime of the lamps and LED drivers. For fast moving traffic (where a motion sensor would trigger too late) lamps could be connected and relay the information of a moving vehicle ahead to do the same thing on highways for example.
I helped set up some Phillips street lamps in a few streets in my town which auto dim after being on for some hours. They dim to around 50% but the change is not noticable. The fixtures can also be programmed and controlled via DALI.
what if they make a solar powered LED street lamps?
Honest question: what's with your *extremely questionable* use of *bold letters*
Nice, seems like a good compromise between turning lights off after a certain time vs leaving them on all night
@@chael9323 China has a lot of solar powered LED street lamps in an integrated design so no cables are needed.
One thing that I would have liked to see touched upon more in studies, is how LED lights perform at night in the rain. I constantly struggle in night time rainy weather under LED lighting fixtures when compared to the HPS.
We used to have an LED lamp Infront our house which mimics a traditional lamp, primarily emitting light to the side. Now we got a new one emitting light almost exclusively down. It barely produces any light pollution (looking from the side I can barely even tell it's on) while providing much brighter light on the street. I like this change
Wow people panicked because of seeing the milky way
I've never seen it with my own eyes.. it's really sad to be honest
@@tahaistheboss98 same here
@@tahaistheboss98 for real? It's beautiful. I can't stand cities. Even towns can get depressing because you can't see the stars with all the light pollution...
@@tahaistheboss98 Yeah, i is. LOL. Your whole life you haven't been out of town?
*cough *cough flatheads *cough *cough
I love being blinded by LEDs at 5 in the morning as I attempt to drive to work
Eddie L it is dangerous in non western nations where jumping the signal and pedestrians crosssing the road at random are common place.
Your more awake but who gives a shit your retina is gone
If your job gets you up at 5am I'd say it's time to look elsewhere
@@peterwhittle522 ah yes, i too hate making money and a living. Hold on i hear customer service jobs are 9 to 5 right?
The fact people took this sarcastic comment seriously is hilarious.
Also, most of the people who put this light on their cars are so inept they can't figure out how to adjust them so they ending being a danger to others
@@Wolfstanus instant reply in a 2 year old thread. What a lad
Couple of things I noticed about LED streetlights: The beam is rather focused, and lends little light pollution outside of its "cone" to the point that you almost cannot see where you are coming up on a lighted area at a mile off. A downside is that as you approach, you see dark areas between the lit portions that could literally hide a dog wandering the roadway.
Simple lenses to spread the light a bit so they overlap but not throw much farther than that would solve this.
YES YES YES TELL THE WORLD LETS CHANGE THESE LIGHTS BACK
Orange light bad!
Use your headlights you nanner, that's what they're for
You missed a major factor:
The monochromatic output of sodium vapor lights offers improved visibility in rainy conditions due to its lack of chromatic aberration.
I worked in the engineering department of an LED lighting company. We were well aware of this shortcoming.
Pretty sure the high pressure sodium vapour doesn't emit monochromatic light, while the low pressure sodium lights do. I can't say anything about chromatic aberration though, that seems to be your expertise :)
They put LED (blue-ish kind) lights on my street since this was posted and it's been a major adjustment. To me, everything is darker and the light doesn't reach nearly as far, but the worst part is the shadows. There isn't the same glowy gradation to the shadows, now they just stop. It's super creepy to have one side be brightly lit then total darkness on the other side of an object like a car. I'm actually really surprised that LEDs are worse for light pollution because of the shadows on my street.
I bet they just put LED bulbs in the existing fittings, with reflectors shaped to spread the light from a point source (eg sodium vapour or halogen) rather than a more spread out sourcelike an LED bulb. Its not an inherent problem with LEDs - just they need to have fixtures made for them.
If there is a bright led light in your vision your eyes aperture adjusts to that so the dark parts in your vision become really dark and the overal picture is less clear. That's my experience and it makes sense.
I’ll miss the yellow hue of an empty college campus at night in winter
Yeah my old high school just replaced the flouresent lights installed and they were installed just 6 years earlier yet only 1 light went out just to get led lighting
That was honestly not smart since they would only take 15 years to catch up economically.
This is poetry
@@Selmarya True, but to the great joy of many students that will now be able to learn, without getting a fucking headache from fluorescent lighting. My school just didn't care and all their lights flickered like crazy and it made consentrating at school hard as fuck.
Leds are just the superior lighting technology, it doesn't have to look like a cool blue, I have warm led lighting in my home and it's hard to see the difference between old incondesent lights and these, maybe if you put them next to each other, but these warm led lights do their job good enough at a fraction of the running costs!
nostalgia
Sounds like you're describing one of those eerie, horror dreams.
I switched to color tunable LED bulbs for most of my fixtures a couple years ago. I setup a dimming and warming routine around sunset and brightening + bluing around when I get up. I can't really conclude it was the lights, but around the same time I went from having 3-4 migraines per month to 5-6 per year.
Does that require any new fixtures with a temperature dimmer or something like that?
When you dim incandescent you don’t see the phases of light because it takes time for the tungsten to unLuminate, but when you send the same AC current unless it’s rectified and not all of them are perfectly rectified especially dimmable type you will really see the flickering and the flickering is your eyes picking up on the 60 Hz frequency and if you ever try LEDs that are powered by a DC power supply you will noticeably notice zero flickering for instance look at TVs chances are they’re using DC current power the diodes inside the TV and that’s not bothering you before that it was a Micro fluorescent tube inside the LCD.
@@HappyBeezerStudios the smart bulbs i use can be used in standard sockets and dimmed and change color with a phone / smart device.
I'm in the UK, and in many residential areas, houses have two storeys, the ground floor being the main living space, and the first floor (upstairs) being where the bedrooms are. When the local council replaced the old sodium street lights with fluorescent(!) some 15 years ago, the new fixtures had shades fitted so that not only did no light escape upwards, but the shades also blocked light from reaching the upstairs windows near the street light. The house I lived in at the time had a street light right outside, and prior to the replacement it was impossible to get the room dark at night.
Why not use different types of light in different areas? Use the white LEDs on the busier freeways, and use the warmer LED or HPS in residential areas. Also would like to see sensors which shut off some of the lights when the road is empty.
Well, some LED streetlights can be switched to 50% power between certain hours
Ryan MacFarlane there are some cycling paths in The Netherlands that actually only light up when someone comes by. It has sensors in the road
Rubenyoranpc That sounds amazing, i dont think any of the cycling roads in my country have lamps. I have dozens of chinese bicycle lamps (using not only for light, but also for safety) in my house :D.
Because logistics
HPS lights do not exist anymore unlike L.E.D. lights that have and will be the normal for good
I live in LA and can attest to the truth of the 911 calls. Many, many people here have literally NEVER seen the unpolluted night sky. I grew up in the mountains of Southern California. I remember in high school (we had to be bussed 25 miles and off the mountain to get to school) I brought my girlfriend up with me one weekend when my parents were out of town. She had never been out of the suburban sprawl before and was completely amazed by the night sky.
Fuck You Google I grew up in LA Hollywood area and I remember sometime back in the 90s there was a three day blackout. I thought it was nice as I have been camping before and visited relatives in other cities and knew what the sky should look like. The lack of power didn't bother me one bit.
And you two are now married with 3 children. Right?
GoldenFlags Umm, no. That relationship ended in high school and, to my knowledge, she became a tweeker.
Fuck You Google you didn't happen to go to school in the lancaster palmdale area did you?
Fuck You Google
That reminds me of when I was a kid and we moved about a half hour outside of town, even well before it ballooned in population. It was nice seeing the night sky but I lost track of that feeling for over a decade after moving back closer to everything and getting in a routine.
A few years ago, I took a summer road trip and ended up about 250 miles away from anything that could be called a "city." Was the middle of absolutely nowhere and looking up at the sky on a perfectly clear night was the most refreshing experience I'd had in years. I turned all my shit off, grabbed a beer, and just relaxed for a couple days.
While I hate cold, blueish lights in households, I actually prefer them at night on the street. It gives a more natural moonlight vibe !
Where I live, many LED fixtures are dimmed when nobody is around, and quickly increase their output whenever someone goes by. Very useful!
We have new street lights here that glow a blue/purple color. It's hideous and difficult to see when in them and our city uses them only in one area and sporadically at that.
I'd love your insight as to them.
The blue-purple lights are a normal streetlight that has failed. A phosphor that is meant to shift the blue to white or something like that has burned off/melted/decayed. This is showing up wherever the lights have been changed over to white LED, a combination of normal failure rates and some producers/vendors that flooded the market with second-grade elements.
There was a manufacturing defect that effected a large number of LED’s used in street lamps at one point. They high a high premature failure rate.
Wow thanks for the info guys. I wonder how long it'll be until my city decides to change them out.
It's one stretch of roadway that just added center medians and crosswalks to, in an area known locally for high levels of accidents (involving pedestrians) - I thought the purplish-blue color was something for awareness or visibility lol
There’s a street light in my school parking lot and the light is purple like a black light.
I figured those light are to detract people from doing drugs.
8:30 I think I've only ever seen the Milky Way properly once in my life, when I was over at a friend's house in the middle of some fields, and with a perfectly clear sky.
It was absolutely astonishing, and I gazed at it for a good 15 minutes!
Jan Tuts many people go for decades before seeing it, sadly , due to pollution and city life, when one first sees it, it’s like a god-moment!
Most well presented science data videos on this and other subjects. :> Great voice, clean production, swift learning but not rushed. Should be used in schools.
Right? It's really good! Very clear and unambiguous presentation.
Agree!
I am sure this has already been mentioned, but I’ve lived in two neighbourhoods in the UK over the past 10 years or so which switched to LED systems with late-night dimming. It’s really pleasant to have the world noticeably dimmer later at night.
In my area, they just converted an intersection from HPS to LED. I can see much better and everything is lit up white (about 5k) instead of orange. One downfall I noticed immediately that the glare is much worse tho. The glare that comes from the fixtures themselves is actually kind of blinding/distracting. From my experience LEDs aren't anywhere near as reliable as HPS. Most of them have cheap made drivers that fail. I can't tell you how many I've seen flickering or strobing over the last few years which is a whole new level of distraction.
That's my main issue, technology being pushed based on theory, thay they SHOULD last longer. I live in Sarnia Ontario, Canada, and i gotta tell you, most lights here are LED, eith the occasional left ocer HPS lamps, and about as many LED fixtures are dead as there were cycling or rarely completely dead HPS lamps and fixtures years ago. So it's bullshit in that most units, I'm sure in major cities are cheaply built. Also i miss color of sodium lamps, very nice at night reflecting off water.
@@inoutdoor4211 I fully agree. Even the push for EVs is BS. The battery technology isn't anywhere near good enough to be practical but since politics got involved, they're forcing us to go that route anyways. I'm all for the LED conversions but they need to make them reliable first and do something about the glare. I still like HPS lights better for now because of those reasons. The light may not be in our visual range at night, but they still enable you to see the road and they're subtle. Not blinding or distracting at all.
there was a whole street in allentown pa that had strobing leds due to some issue and it was the first time I saw a major downside to the leds. The residents also were not happy about it and said it had been going on for weeks
When I'm tired, I find it's easier to stay awake and alert at the wheel under white than yellow street lighting.
Who asked?
@@VicMcFly111 No one. But his thesis was that white lights screw with your internal clock. Which they do, but that's a benefit: They help you stay awake at the wheel.
The problem is that the effects of that light extend well past the highway because of sky glow. The bluer lights also result in bluer sky glow. Circadian rhythm disruption has been shown to cause or exacerbate certain serious health issues. The connection between sky glow and circadian rhythm was not discussed much in this video.
@@samuelhammons2528 Sky glow is definitely undesireable. It can, however, be much reduced even without resorting to yellow ligths.
But I don't buy the idea of circadian rhytm disruption from bright skies being a serious health issue. If it were, people in the Nordic countries and Canada would be seriously short-lived.
So sayeth the shill.
'Many years ago' here in UK, I remember we used to have Mercury vapour lighting. Bright blue/white light. Great visibility. Then suddenly we changed to the gloom of orange sodium.
This was a wonderful video. It was well researched and very well presented, recognizing nuance and limitations in our knowledge instead of soapboxing about one perspective or the other. We definitely need more stuff like this on the internet.
We've just had 3000K LED streetlights installed on the highway outside our house, replacing low pressure sodium fixtures and it's one heck of a difference, and very dazzling (although this is probably because we're used to LPS lamps that appear dimmer - they do appear to be around the same luminance and light the road up nicely)
I live close to a main road which has switched to LED street lights and its made such a difference to being able to see the stars so much so I bought my daughter a telescope.
I prefer HPS lights because it makes it easier to fall asleep when I'm driving. I like to be well rested when I arrive at my destination.
@@felicleboge9079 Someone else already made that joke. Word for word.
Odd. In my city the LED street lights made skyglow and light pollution 10x worse.
@@EdmontonRails I guess it depends if one area also switched the fixtures at the same time, to improve direction of light downwards.
Im so Pissed. In Mississauga Ontario they changed all orange lights to the Led White lights. I understand they save power.
But they are so annoying . The orange hue helped keeped bugs away and was less stressful to our eyes.
a color of light doesn't keep bugs away. certain lights attract bugs though. are u saying that the bugs are attracted to the new lights?
Insects visible spectrum is much more blue centred than ours, and they see red very poorly, if at all. So a higher CCT light would definitely be more likely to attract them. I mean bug lights are yellow after all.
I miss the HPS lights. 4100k is pretty much standard in most cities in Ontario now, and it's very jarring. 3000k would've been a compromise, but I've barely even seen any LED street lights this colour so far.
just love how in depth your videos are .as a person who lives in a country where electricity isnt always a constant (we call it loadshedding)
im leaning towards team efficiency with the cold LED lights in cities and towns especially since it is horribly mismanaged here. the lights are quite often just on 24/7 , except when theres loadshedding lmao and in certain informal settlements they have these massive hps halo lights but they used cheap day/night sensors so those are on 24/7 as well
I'm sure someone has said this by now, but you're absolutely right about HPS being harder to filter out than LPS due to pressure broadening. I'm an astronomer, and we encourage towns near observatories to use downward facing LPS lamps, never HPS.
Your videos are great!!
Well you will soon end up using L.E.D. lights as LPS and HPS no longer exist
@Stephen Snell HPS is definitely still made. LPS is harder to find.
But who cares when you can get LEDs in any color temperature. People saying they hate LED light are really saying they hate cool white light. It's the color temperature that matters, that used to be fixed for each technology, but for LED it's not anymore
@@VOIP4ME and fixture designs, really people just hate change and it makes em angry because they're not used to it, it'll happen to all of us as we age
I never knew I would come to CZcams to actually listen to and enjoy a full lecture. Insightful.
I live in the UK and where sodium has been switched for LED we definitely notice the increase in light, but because the panels used to produce this light have many individual diodes, the lighting makes depth difficult to gauge. Potholes and other obstacles can look flat as the multiple diodes eliminate shadow on anything they illuminate. This has been so much of an issue that some lights have been switched back to sodium, as the single bulb casts even shadows, while also not being blindingly bright if you catch the light when driving towards it.
If we continue to have these multi-diode panels installed I think I would much prefer sodium lighting, as obstacles and obstructions in the road are often made invisible by the elimination of shadow, and the flat uniformity of the road surface even when there are potholes and bumps can be very unsettling.
Also in the UK, the LED lighting is all very well on the kinds of large multi-lane roads we see on the video, where the light source is far above the road and there is long range visibility, but we also have a predominance of much smaller roads in the UK, rarely straight, and sometimes on quite steep gradients. In settled areas these kinds of roads often have many parked cars along the road itself too, such that there is room only for a vehicle to pass by in one direction at a time, and it is often necessary (or expected at least) for a driver to give way to oncoming drivers along such roads.
The difficulty on these kinds of roads at night is that whereas with sodium lights a driver can see the headlights of a vehicle coming the other way sometimes long before seeing the vehicle itself, with LED street lighting the beam of headlights of such vehicles becomes far harder to discern, being of a similar blue-white tone to the street lighting, meaning the driver identifies the presence of the oncoming vehicle typically less quickly. In fact, in some situations (on steep gradients mainly) a driver can not always immediately discern whether a distant light source is an LED streetlight or a stationary or slow moving vehicle even when it is in view. I encounter these kinds of situations quite widely in my area, so for me, it was very interesting on this video to hear that improved road safety is a major motivation of using the blue-white LED street-lights. On many roads I'm sure it is, but I surprisingly often find the opposite to be true.
I live in Hungary, here all the lights have been replaced by almost LEDs, luckily they left the yellow light in the downtowns. (Here in the EU, downtowns are mostly pedestrian areas full of old buildings, here the LED would have been very distracting. Although I think the yellow light is better on the roads as well. It illuminates much more space and the oncoming car doesn’t dazzle as much as the LED.
Moonlight is not actually blueish, it's a lower colour temperature than the sun! It just appears bluer because, as you said, under low lighting conditions we are more sensitive to blue light and so pick up that more.
On the plus side of the yellow being away from the wavelength that the eye is sensitive to under night conditions, it means they are less dazzling and the eye is less likely to adjust and you can still see things in the shadows. Car tail lights are red for the same reason. It’s also why the military use red filters in certain conditions such as in back of of a helicopter before a night drop.
Ironically people used to HATE the orange glow of the High Pressure Sodium lights when it first was introduced in the 70's/80's but it IS iconic to those who have a historical mindset and grew up to the "orange glow" coming home from parties, late nights out and about, coming home from work, etc..
RGB street lights when
when asus makes them kek
@@ska042 R + G + B = White. That's how white LED's work. Just like white on your phone or monitor.
@@TheCandoRailfan please explain RGBW LEDs then, you're both right, you can do both but blue+yellow phosphor renderes colour better.
www.photonstartechnology.com/learn/how_leds_produce_white_light
@@hede151 RGB, RGBW, and RGBA can be packaged LEDs. Or individual LEDs that are mixed outside of the optic. with RGB you can get "white light" but it has a very low CIM and will look off. To get around this most manufacturers uses RGBW as it adds a white led to the package. the reason for adding the white led or amber in the cases of RGBA is for a better CRI. the best option for changeable white light's is by using a dynamic white or tunable white that uses 3-4 different white LEDs to give you a spectrum of white light. If you buy a white 3200k bin 2 LED from Cree or Osram the only colour that LED will be emitted is a ~3200k white as there are no other colours or temperatures in the package.
@@col888881 Exactly, the white LED in the RGBW package is not just another RGB package, but an LED that makes actual white light, meaning proper white LEDs do exist unlike what @The Cando Railfan said.
I've watched this video before but watching it today compared to your far newer videos, this is extremely hard to follow. You talk with literally no breaks :))
In regards to safety and LED lighting of roadways, one thing I have noticed and have experienced while driving is that one of the fail modes of LED lighting is strobing. I have found myself startled, and by reflex taking my eyes off the road in front of me to look into the rear view mirror to see if I am being pulled over. This strobing can be very intense ( full on to full off ) and at a frequency that can confuse you for a few seconds. It also makes me wonder if this could also be a problem for someone with epilepsy and if so has steps ever been taken by manufacturers to prevent this.
I think the compromise is to use warm (2700k) LED lights, maybe even slightly variable ones, if economical.
Besides that, adding domes & shields to light fixture would be very useful.
This video was quite illuminating!
AirborneSurfer oof that pun hurts
BocuD You should always wear sunglasses in case the puns become too radiant!
czcams.com/video/_asNhzXq72w/video.html
Some bright ideas for sure.
KristiChan1 It's a wonder that anyone is still left in the dark about these things!
to me the yellow/orange lights have a bigger effective range. the LEDs are very bright up close but they dont have the same kind of diffusion and the lighting is really harsh, especially under wet conditions. also the yellow lights are very distinct and it's easier to notice from a distance that they are street lights
Was it france where the headlights are yellow for snowy/misty situations.
If they don't have the right diffusion, then they aren't using the right optic.
@@floyd2386 the reason doesnt matter when the outcome is shit anyway
@@soundlesspeal You are generalizing with your original statement. Not all LED lights are going to be like that. In fact, the ones my city uses have better coverage than the lights they replaced. So no, not shit anyway.
@@floyd2386 saying that the old ones were worse doesnt tell me anything. of course its better if they work now, but thats not saying LEDs are the best solution they couldve gone with
Hi there, I am a fairly new subscriber. I just wanted to jump in and say I very much enjoy yours videos . Every vid I watch had taught me
Hopefully sometime in the future, we can have "smart" LED street lights that change the Kelvin light temp color throughout the day. Start the day with a 4000k-6000k, and as the day progresses to sunset, lower it down to 3200k, but still LED (But keep 4000k-6000k on major highways for better highway driving).
I think this is ideal genius idea that is best of both worlds
You... Dont need streetlights during the day? The sun still exists
@@Timeward76 not with that attitude
@@Soonerblake007 no, Timeward's got a point. I don't understand why you would need street lighting during the day.
Except for tunnels maybe, where matching the light colour in tunnels with outside surroundings would be pleasing to the eyes.
Nocap underrated comment
My main complaint with the new LED lights is during the rain at night. (Which is pretty common for me, living in Seattle) Especially the ones that aren't diffused at all, acting more like focused spotlights.
The raindrops on the windshield create a myriad of little lenses that redirect the lights directly into your eyes, like having a bunch of little LEDs placed against your windshield blocking your vision of the road past the raindrops. Windshield Wipers help a little, but the raindrops are continuous and immediately begin refilling the windshield as soon as the wipers pass.
Quarnozian great comment, we need a side topic on this. Very interesting
I really dislike the spotlight effect, not just the "rain problem", but also it looks really bad. Sure a spotlight with raindrops can look kinda cool but the spotlight itself usually just blows out the whole image. Recently I was in Italy trying to shoot some long exposures at night with a tripod so that I could have smooth water and minimize noise, but my pictures ended up completely ruined by those lights. I wish they could frost the glass or wrap some cloth around the street lamps to diffuse the luminance, would look much better and wouldn't hurt the eye as much. I imagine you would waste a lot of energy with that solution though
I noticed that when there is snow on the road, led produced a false light effect that was harder to define edges, bumps and dips, due to the fact that snow reflects blueish white light better than yellow orange. The blueish white light lights up dips, edges and bumps so they look the same as the rest of the terain. The yellow orange light gets aborbed more and bumps, dips and edges remain dimer than the surrounding terain allowing you to see the type of retain better.
Turn the wiper speed up - drive faster; you'll catch less rain drops - problem abated!
I wouldn't ban them, I would recommend people to stay away from products that are not OEM. Inexperienced manufacturers that produce LED and LED headlights should be better regulated
As an astrophotographer, I greatly appreciate that you included some commentary about light pollution.
I really like your diggin in to the subject. Right in the sweet spot between a design engineer and a scientist.
18:06 - "And in 40 or 50 years, who knows what technology might light our roadways"
"Roadways? Where we're going, we don't need roadways!" :)
As a child I was convinced that by year 2000 we'll have flying cars. I won't buy this tale anymore.
Light on our road ways black and white
Flying cars would be a stupid idea. Just image if two crashed in mid air. now if you now anything about physics
@@ddsjgvk ikr
Hero of Kush mathieu kutak IKR? Who came up with the idea? People can’t drive im 2-d space let alone 3-d XD,
You never mentioned, but I was told that the color range of the HPS goes through fog better and thus creating more visibility during Fog and perhaps rain. At other times and conditions, the LED should provide much greater visibility.
The HPS light doesn't exactly "go through" fog better. It is more that shorter wavelength light is more easily scattered by fog (and haze/smoke). Instead of seeing only the target being illuminated, your eyes get the reflected and scattered blue light which impacts contrast. Check this link for some example photos: www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?410500-Does-warmer-light-better-penetrate-fog
The real issue is that broad-band LED lighting, which tends to be cooler than incandescent and HPS, can be a real nightmare in foggy or hazy conditions. Regardless of how well you direct the lighting, they will always contribute more to light pollution due to this scattering.
Men, this video is awesome! I study architecture, one of my assignatures is Light and Acustic confort, i enjoy so much the class and you video match perfect with my curiosity about this topic. Seriously thanks ❤
I can't argue with the data, but I'll say that in my experience strong LED lights at night hurt my eyes and blind me.
Maybe because the light is so focused. Maybe because the new LED headlights for cars and bikes are too bright (way too bright)..
I like the orange tint of sodium lamps. It's un-intrusive and inoffensive to my eyesight. I wish vehicles' headlights were more yellow!
I really hate those new LED headlights on cars. They're blindingly bright. As for bicycle LED headlights, mine is designed to have an optical cutoff to avoid putting light in the face of pedestrians and other bicyclists. Motorists can see me without having to get blinded by the LED's. Most of the light goes on the road with a little bit going up in the air and shining off of trees I ride under. That light only shines off of the trees as I'm about to go under the trees. In between these two points where other peoples faces are there is no light going there. Also my bicycle lights don't run off of batteries.
They don't have to be white though
Aren't LEDs capable of emitting warmer hues
I’m glad you can see into the future with your LED headlights, but I’m about to fly off the road
That's a different issue, of governments failing to adopt their regulations to technology. The laws are written to limit headlights by the Watts. Halogen and now even worse LEDs are able to be far brighter than the law intended because they never imagined this efficiency.
@@tristanridley1601 Actually it's because people install improper aftermarket LEDs
@@exoticcar5482
Wow you're right. I swear this was true when I learned about it, but maybe just Canada.
How do regulators allow those to be sold and not immediately ticket the purchaser's vehicle?
@@exoticcar5482 no still see it on OEM ones
@@itptires That's if the driver forgot to turn off the high beams. The DOT regulates light cutoffs for low beams so you're not blinded regardless of light source
Your videos are so comprehensive, every single aspect is covered and presented in a professional and concise way. Very easy to understand 👍
I prefer the Sodium lights. LEDs are just a bit too bright for me. I guess that's the point, though, keeping you awake while driving. Still, LEDs are adjustable, so maybe a change in color temperature could help all of us
You're videos are so good I'm rewatching most all of them like I do a favorite show.
What i don’t like is headlights that are bluer. I think led lamps are better because they don’t shine directly into your eyes. while Led headlights are often shining right into your eyes.
My opinion car headlights should be warmer and street lights whiter
I think the problem with that is people drop those LED bulbs in and then don't realign their headlights to adjust for the new output.
@@Arckra Also, headlight lenses have cut offs for the light they were designed for, to keep from blinding others. HID or LED may not work properly in the same lens. Of course, people also don't bother to readjust or even look at their vehicle from a distance to see if it will blind others. I actually went to a big parking lot and checked my headlights after I upgraded them from sealed beam to halogen with a housing (hella light upgrade on my 40 year old pickup).
@@horatiuml Yes, I try to be considerate, and being on the other end of the stick, painfully blinded by others is a good reminder. I'm also a bit of a truck enthusiast and do as much work as I can on my own, and had read how light lenses work on the internet forums for vehicles. Other people may know their lights shine into other drivers eyes, and may or may not care, but many may not know about using the proper lens. To many people think of themselves without considering how it effects others, or they don't consider other points of view.....something I have learned to be more careful about over the years.
I remember when people were complaining about HIDs, both for color and intensity.
@@CGT80 I actually talked to someone that argued they could see better so they were safer. My response was something along the lines of sure, instead I'll crash into you since I can't see shit. Proper alignment/lenses are very important.
As an electrician, most LED bulbs will say to disconnect the ballast or not. In general, a replacement LED bulb is used with a ballast bypassed, i.e. 120/240v direct. True LEDs have a driver to give them the exact amount of volt/amps. The replacement lamps must have something in them that's doing the same thing, but hardly with the same efficiency that a planned LED install with a proper driver has.
Mean Well HLG drivers are nice. Dimmable as well.
The 54w cob style LED lamps that I used were better than the 250w MH that they replaced. These were down lights, running at 277v, and I pulled the ballast and cap, re mounted the socket to fit the cob light in there and ran them direct wired. It was a great retrofit and the color and visibility was improved even thought the cob emitted light in all directions. The driver that is built in seemed to get the job done. Last month, I converted all 38 down lights on that property to 150w LED 5,000K down lights. The difference is like..........well, night and day. The lights don't blind people on the street and they light the parking lot further from the building. Another 2 properties I take care of have a batch of LED's with bad drivers. In the last year I have replaced 28 drivers in those wall packs. The company who sold us the lights actually replaced the drivers for us, but it is poor quality and a lot of labor.
I have Citizen COBs. They are amazing.
I studied electronics in high school and still dabble. LEDs will actually burn out at higher voltages (the ones we used couldn't go more than 3V) but if you send a pulsating direct current instead of a straight Direct Current you can actually push the voltage much higher and in the process increase the brightness of the LEDs. I presume all LED drivers used for outdoor lighting or replacement lighting use a rectifier/driver circuit (rectifier convert normal AC wall current into DC, driver converts DC into Pulsating DC) while most portable LED lights I've found just use a direct power circuit from the batteries (AA, AAA, C, and D batteries/cells all produce 1.5V per battery/cell so two of those in series will produce 3 volts). I did have one portable LED light that used 4 batteries so perhaps some newer LEDs can handle more voltage).
COBs can handle high voltage, but they are technically a checkerboard matrix of teensy micro LEDs placed on a surface the size of a nickel. But as a unit can handle anywhere from 36 to over 100v at varying levels of current from 700ma to 2100ma. They need big passive heatsinks and are tons of fun.
Even in your picture I feel as though it was harder for me to see under the led lights. While they may have increased actual light output they made everything kind of mush together and the lack of gradience leads me to miss things. It also just fustrates me and makes me drive more angerly.
Skill issue
1:22 That transition made my rod cells go ouchie.
They need to make sure that the light pollution does not interfere with Astronomy light pollution rejection filters. Also since LEDs do not require a ballast to turn on I think that they should use motion sensors with timers so that they are not on when no one is around
My brother just did a weekend trip to Virginia, and he saw lighted road warning signs (sharp curve, stuff like that) that only come on via motion sensors. We were both flabbergasted.
perfection would be, blue LED's in/on highways, industrial zones, and business districts; with high pressure sodium for residential/suburban zones.
Well, could do without high pressure sodium lamps by using 3700k LED.
Yeah softer LEDs are probably the way to go.
I agree that having bluer light on the roads and then more orange light everywhere else, makes sense - but this can, as others have said, be achieved with LED's.
@@predabot__6778
I've seen people say the HPS looks harsh and artificial. I think it look warm and welcoming, like a bonfire.
I heard highways are owned by a Provence or a state not the city it’s seperite
In my area on the UK N(ewcastle/ Gateshead) nearly all our street lights are LED. Additionally the council decided a few years ago to reduce the power by 50% up to midnight, and by 75% between midnight and 5.30am in appropriate residential areas.
Great channel - 👍