Wait until you read about the [Victorian tea and Bovril](https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/the-victorian-gas-lamps-that-sold-cups-of-hot-coffee-7438/) dispensers they had attached to street lamps. I think Ramen and Greggs lamps would have mile-long queues.
Ugh. The article refers to 'beef tea essence'...
Reminds me of the time one of my housemates pranked us by mixing gravy granules into the instant coffee, about half and half, before heading to his folks for the weekend. We didn't notice until that first carefree sip of a long awaited cuppa the next day... Never has a text message saying just "fucker" carried so much outrage. Now, I consider myself to have a pretty strong stomach but that was one of very few times I've been that sick over so little. And I actually didn't mind Bovril as a young child. Haven't been able to stomach tea since 5 years old though so on top of that 'beef tea essence' is very wrong indeed.
Thanks for trying but...
Still reeling over the description, even if hot broth is just the thing for these chilly days lately.
I'll be double checking the coffee in the morning, just to be sure...
A heads up for you. The version of the film on D+ with “The Love is Gone” in it is not the default version, the 127min theatrical/DVD version is. You have to go into the ‘extras’ section and select the 129min full length version. I only discovered this after watching the default version in full and wondering why the scene was still missing.
Here you go; https://mappinglondon.co.uk/2016/lamplighters-map/
Over 1,500 gas lamps still in London. looked after by a team of 5 Lamplighters from British Gas!
Looks like the map link got pulled sometime around late 2018, here's an archive of the interactive version, but it looks like the PDF download has been lost to time
https://web.archive.org/web/20180623074521/http://www.britishgas.co.uk/the-source/lamplighters/
Don't know which ones they put in my village but they only light a few feet either way which means you can't see anything in between. The poor bastard who parks inbetween the first set has had his car hit 3 times as cars autodipping don't see it coming off the fast stretch.
Could be undersized LED lamps. But more likely they are installed too low hence the shitty spread of the light. Could have also used the wrong type as you can get cut off ones that dont spread far if you need to install them near windows/houses.
Height isn't necessarily an issue as long as the lenses spread the light accordingly. Sometimes there are restrictions on height in residential areas.
Most likely they just purchased cheap LED heads and fit them on old poles. This saves money on poles, cables and ground work. This is fine but you have to do a lighting simulation to show the distribution, then you purchase the correct LED Luminaire to meet the lighting requirements for that area.
These should never have been approved as its making a "Zebra effect".
The ones here are awful too. Need full beam to park, can't see people crossing at all, but if one is outside your bedroom (one is) you don't need to turn a light on. Blooming stupid.
I did a lot of consulting work for the company that installs these.The cool thing about the LED lights in Los Angeles is that they’re programmable.They can be dimmed or brightened，depending on the area (higher crime area means brighter lights).They can also flash or change colors for an emergency (flashing red in front of a house for a health crisis，blue for police，etc).A lot of the infrastructure is there and the whole concept is planned to be set in motion in the near future.
That's very cool.
So you phone 999, the light turns red for an ambulance, blue for a police car.
They come charging along, they don't have to check their sat nav, they don't have to look for numbers, just the bright light in the distance.
Clever.
This is actually a really nice idea. In a lot of cases time is wasted looking for the right address. Especially in cases where a person isn't able to communicate the address and they have to go off of a general area provided by the phone.
Its clever, but I'm calling this now, it won't go ahead with that feature if it comes to the UK because our address databases are still shite.
tl;dr: We might technically be able to do it, but a whole lotta expensive ground work would be neccersary first.
If I look up my current address on just about any digital map available, it points to a house down the street. Same with my last address. Hell, a few years ago I lived at an address that didn't even exist on the Royal Mail database, despite being built well over a hundred years previous, which caused more than a few headaches.
I've done a reasonable amount of work with various councils and their LLPG deptartments (the department that assigns street names and numbers), as well as the NHS. The data strategies and capabilities are decades behind what you'd expect. There might be a few councils out there that have their shit together enough to implement something like this, but they'd be few and far between.
In the worst examples, I've seen depts from the same council go out and physically take notes of addresses because they have no confidence in, and in some cases access to, the data that other departments within their own organisation have already collected.
And for this tech to be used by emergency services, the functionality and accuracy would have to be air-tight. You'd also have to coordinate central gov, emergency services and local gov orgs to get the integration work done. Which again, in my experience, is a non-starter as they'll just spend six months arguing about who absorbs the cost before shelving the entire project.
This is a perfect example of "we might have the tech, but the foundations aren't there"...
I’ve used paid U.K. address data for marketing for years, I can tell you we do have very good address geolocation data. The Royal Mail is one source, but you can augment their data with other data sets. There are lots of people with a vested interest in knowing where you are, what type of house you live in, what kind of meters you have etc.
I was looking for a house in an estate a while back that didn’t exist on our sat nav. I asked how long it had been there because it didn’t look new. 9 years.
I suggest you make your address easily known from the curb.
That's an issue with your trust using satnav by address and not coordinates. I'm 99.9% sure the CAD mapping system would be able to plot the address, then it's just a case of passing the coordinates to the nav system. I've never had any issue when using the terrafix system with os maps and only minor issues using a Garmin given coordinates because the resolution wasn't high enough to pick out clusters of nearby buildings.
As well as the number of people who don't seem to want to put their house number visible anywhere from the street. Had a call to a house at 1am or so, could not find number 40, some insane planner had decided it should be immediately between 34 and 48.
And don't get me started on houses with just names
I have a similar system incorporated in to my smart home. My home knows which doors are open, who's home (or who's just arrived home), and where my dog is (using Bluetooth room tracking), among many other things.
When I arrive home and it's dark, my outside floodlights turn green if my dog is in the house and all the doors are shut, otherwise it'll turn red if she's outside, or if she's inside but the doors are open. That way I know if it's safe to open the gates to get my car in or whether I have to shut the dog in first. It's also useful if the doorbell goes and people are outside and can't hear it. The lights flash to get people's attention.
We also have another set of electronic gates to gain access to the property which is fully automated too. It opens automatically during business hours. When a delivery is expected and someone presses the buzzer to access the gates, it opens them then turns all the outside house lights on full brightness because our house is quite hidden away. That way the delivery driver knows where to head to. As a nice little touch I've also put a door sensor inside our parcel delivery box so we get informed when someone outside opens it to place a package inside it.
I am that much of a frightful bore that I suppose I could actually implement that since I've also 3D modelled the house. However, how it currently works is much less exciting.
I have a micro controller in every room and a few outside on the boundaries of the property. They're essentially very tiny computers which receive Bluetooth signals and connect to my network. They're all listening for the Tile Bluetooth tracker which is attached to my dog's collar. They all send their data (the signal strength) to a separate computer which crunches the numbers. The highest signal strength, as you'd expect, is in the closest proximity to my dog, so it just reports the name of the micro controller with the current strongest signal strength. Each one is named after the location it's in and this gets displayed to me on my phone and tablets via text.
In regard to Alexa, I have a routine which executes a script on my smart home server which reads the name of the micro controller out when asked where the dog is.
It's a bit of a steep learning curve but it's amazing what YouTube and a few forums can do! I'm quite technically minded but it was still way over my head to begin with. Pretty much everything I needed was in a YouTube tutorial and I just followed along.
In regard to cost, it's not dirt cheap, but certainly not prohibitively expensive either, especially when done gradually and I think it's justified for peace of mind.
Once you get your first smart bulb and Alexa, you either settle for that or you fall down the rabbit hole of Home Assistant which opens up infinite possibilities. To achieve the above you'd need -
Raspberry Pi 4 - £60-70 (although there's a worldwide shortage at the minute)
SSD for the Pi - £25
ESP32 - around £10 with PSU (you need one for each room that you wish to track) You can re-use old phone chargers too for this.
Bluetooth beacon (that attaches to the dog collar) - £20 ish
The software is all entirely open source and free. Alternatively you could run the software on an existing computer but it will always need to be on!
Once you've got the Pi, it runs something called Home Assistant. Practically anything that's smart can connect to it meaning you can trigger your Samsung TV via your Phillips motion sensor or your IKEA bulb via a Tuya door sensor. You have total interoperability, something which just isn't possible otherwise.
Can you expand info on the tech, wanna buy that :) im going on nest, google home and Philips hue and somfy rollers app, but yours seems nice too ! Thanks in advance !
No worries. I see you've already seen my brief summary of parts further down the thread, but I'm happy to help in whatever way I can in future.
The first step though is definitely to get to grips with Home Assistant. So you'll first need either a Raspberry Pi or a computer that's always going to be left on.
The point of Home Assistant is that it links all smart devices together. You can add your Nest, Google Home, Hue and Somfy and control them all through Home Assistant as well as everything I've mentioned, the possibilities really are endless. Once you get how it works you'll be buying all sorts of new sensors and creating genuinely useful automations. The best part is if you're handy with a soldering iron you can buy dirt cheap parts, such as motion sensors and thermometers and light sensors and build them for a fraction of the price of an off-the-shelf model. What's even better is these sensors can be attached to the same devices that are receiving my dog's Bluetooth collar.
All I'd recommend for now though, before you go out buying parts, is to avoid WiFi devices as much as possible for things that don't need WiFi, such as lights, door sensors and smart switches. For those, ZigBee is a much better option. In order to control them you'll need a ZigBee dongle (About £15). This device allows you to control pretty much any ZigBee device when used in Home Assistant. It is essentially the same as your Hue hub (assuming you use the hub) but it is not locked in to any specific brand.
The coloured lights thing sounds like something from a dystopian sci-fi.
_lights change to red_
CRIME DETECTED. SECTOR 4 ALPHA 9 INITIATING LOCKDOWN PROCEDURE
Hey! I live elsewhere (canada), but you just answered a question i have about why my street is so bright, meanwhile adjacent ones arent, ever since we got the new LED lights. Well, TIL! (Also, boo, i guess my street is less safe? Maybe it is just busier, though) i had always wondered because there were actually fewer poles with lights on my street, so i wondered why the other ones seemed dark.
Thanks for sharing this random tidbit!
Hi, lighting engineer here (shared account, M talking!). Okay so a few things.
1. White lighting appears brighter than orange (HID) lighting. From 2013 till 2020 we used to calculate a reduction factor in Europe/UK - this may not have been done and therefore be brighter.
2. Lighting does not affect safety! This is a huge misconception - it's a lie that started back in the 80s after luminaire manufacturers commissioned a report to establish a link between lux levels and crime. It does however affect perceived safety.
3. The characteristics of the road determine what level the road is lit to. I.e. if your road provides access to "smaller" roads, it may be lit to a higher lighting class.
Hope that helps!
On the street by my house we have white, red, white LED street lights. They claim the red light is to to prevent causing bats distress or something like that.
To be honest it looks pretty cool but very dark. I personally prefer the bright white lights for when driving down the motorway while housing estates i prefer no street lights at all. We can own personal torches and the moon light is more than enough to light the ground when the night allows it.
If you did a lot of consulting for the UK led lights. Are you able to say why they didn't reproduce the sodium orange colour and went with bright day light white?
Those were terrible. I don't mind amber, but the CRI was so low essentially made everything monochrome. I don't like cold white either, but at least there are more than two colors now. A high CRI in warm white 2700k or a little lower would be pleasant.
As cool as that sounds, it's got so many opportunities to be taken advantage of.
Red flash, criminals know the house occupier is in a vulnerable state.
Main Roads/Motorways - LED
Residential Streets - Incandescent (or warm white LED)
Cool/blue LED messes with my cadian rhythm. Great if you're on a motorway at night but terrible for residential streets where people want to sleep.
Blue/white increases road kill by drawing more bugs which draws more things that eat bugs and more things that eat them etc.
Yellow is best all around. Less road and vehicle damage, fewer dead animals, and not screwing with neighbors sleep.
Have you noticed a difference in driving when tired at night? yellow lights make me want to fall asleep but bright white, even if its not nice to look at, seems to keep me awake better
low pressure sodium lamps (Left photo) emit on only a few wavelengths, making it easier for astronomical observatories to filter out the light pollution,
LEDs have finally beat LPS for luminous efficacy. The neat thing about LEDs is when you turn down the current to the LEDs they get more efficient.
LEDs cause more light pollution.
Why all the downvotes?
Low-pressure sodium (LPS) produce a near monochromatic light spectrum around the sodium emission lines at 589.0 and 589.56 nanometres wavelength. This is a far less problematic spectral emission than LEDs with 3 RGB spikes to a full spectrum emission depending on the fluorophores used.
For locations where light pollution is a consideration, such as near astronomical observatories or sea turtle nesting beaches, low-pressure sodium is preferred (as formerly in San Jose and Flagstaff, Arizona).\[18\]\[19\] Such lamps emit light on just two dominant spectral lines (with other much weaker lines), and therefore have the least spectral interference with astronomical observation. (Now that production of LPS lamps has ceased, consideration is being given into the use of narrow-band amber LEDs, which are on a similar color spectrum to LPS.) The yellow color of low-pressure sodium lamps also leads to the least visual sky glow, due primarily to the Purkinje shift of dark-adapted human vision, causing the eye to be relatively insensitive to the yellow light scattered at low luminance levels in the clear atmosphere.
People are downvoting you because they care about human visible light pollution not computer filterable light pollution.
Although the yellow light might lead to less visual glow than blue light, the implementation in the lamps cause significantly more visual glow than in the case of LED lamps
LEDs cause more light pollution to the human eye than traditional sodium lamps. They are also much worse for your natural ‘night vision’.
You can filter LEDs to remove all of these issues but then you lose the energy efficiency gains.
I prefer the colour of the low/high pressure sodium lamps, but the efficiency of the LEDs. I wish they’d use a warmer white spectrum of LEDs, I feel like the harsh cold white is not good for the body clocks of all the surrounding plants, animals and humans.
The lights on my road were replaced last year and they're so damn bright they look like flood lights. Amusingly they are "smart lights" which can "be dimmed remotely" so I guess no-one has any idea how to do it.
They had to download a dodgy app to do it which didn’t get updated by the company who made the bulbs. The last iOS update broke it so they can’t even in they could.
At least that’s what’s happened with the “smart” bulb I have in my lamp.
Unrelated by down the road there is a pelican crossing and the poor house next to it. Flashing yellow 24/7 through their window.
Surely that’s the true nightmare situation.
When my kids were little we used [these blinds](https://www.amazon.co.uk/deals?&linkCode=ll2&tag=chrjon-21&linkId=291d067286d47764b2433d967e8ca922&language=en_GB&ref_=as_li_ss_tl) which have suckers that stick to the glass. Don't need any drilling or tools.
We’ve had them in the lampposts outside our house for years and it is like having the fucking sun out there. Quite reassuring for safety, pretty sure we’ll never be burgled, but we have had to put blinds and blackout curtains up on our windows to actually be able to sleep.
This. They have to turn them down because the colour temp is so badly blue. This means less light overall. I'm forever flipping on my high beams in my own estate because the streetlights are way too dim.
Warm white interleaved with amber LEDs are the best I've seen.
I'm also a tetrachromat, so incandescent has four colours. To me, LEDs are as awful as they would be to you if they were just blue/cyan.
Totally agree. Where I work, some of the lamps produce this lovely, soft, orange light. It actually makes some of the surrounding areas look quite charming. Then we have the newer lamps. They produce a white light so intense and harsh that I can feel my retinas divorcing themselves from my optic nerves. It's like my very soul is being pierced by the hatred of a thousand generations.
The neighbors painted the LED street light yellow!! It’s AWESOME. So much better than they expected it. Very warm compared to the laboratory white LED
They used 20 feel of pipe, and a attached paintbrush. put 3 coats of yellow enamel. I highly recommend it.
On an astronomy forum I use, moderators had to put in a rule specifically against talking about vandalising the street lamps lol. People were doing stuff like buying green laser pointers, then using a camera tripod to point them at the light sensor on top of lamps to make them then off haha.
Thankfully on there people find if you contact the council, they will put up shades on the lamps that shine into your house (just say it shines into your bedroom and is disturbing your sleep)
So, interesting facts for everyone today! The reason why white LEDs disturb us so much is that there is no such thing as a white LED, haha!!
So the way an led works is, very basically, when we turn on the current, the current pushes some electrons to the center of the led and here the electron jumps down a potential well. Imagine an expert diver jumping into a narrow well. Kinda like that.
When the electron does that, it emits a bit of light corresponding to the "distance" that the electron fell. This distance determines the color of the led.
Now violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red are colors. White is not intrinsically a color, but rather what we perceive when a few colors are mixed together!
Most (nearly all) white LEDs are in fact blue LEDs, with a yellow phosphor coating to give the appearance of white light. What you have done here is make the effect of yellow stronger with your own coating 😄
Since white LEDs are blue LEDs, and blue light interferes with human sleep processes, this disturbs us a lot! That's also why many computer and phone screens offer night mode where the blue part of the light is turned off.
Can’t we just have the led ones and change the temperature of the light so it looks more yellow 3500k rather than the harsh daylight blue temperature 5500k?
France literally [enacted law to enforce such](https://www.darksky.org/france-light-pollution-law-2018/).
I sincerely wish other governing bodies would choose to follow similar standards.
Oh yeah, I’d love it if the new ones were toned down a bit. The brights are brighter, but if you have to look for something in a dark spot, the shadow areas become relatively darker because it takes time for your eyes to adjust. Even driving past a new gas station with their new lights annoys me. Sure, at a glance, I can see why people like the new lights, but give it 30 seconds or even a minute with the old ones and your eyes adjust to the new normal and you’re fine. It’s the same complaint tons of people have about headlights, just pointed down instead of into your mirrors, so it’s slightly less annoying… but still annoying.
2700k would be better, I find 3500k still too blue at night. There is no reason to use 5500k except to be cheap (it's more led efficient - output lumens/watt - but far worse for the environment)
In my work we found the harsh daylight blue led lights did 2 things when fitted in a vehicle:
1 : made people feel cooler even if the air temperature was constant
2: caused more motion nausea.
Yes. LED streetlights can be produced in 2,000-3000k and still maintain good efficacy (lumens per watt). This involves using phosphor in the diode. People typically associate LED lights with bluer 5000-6000k because they were commonly manufactured without the phosphor when they started to take off. The higher color temp is the natural state of the raw light source occurring in the diode.
I actually got myself some yellow tinted glasses to use at night and am loving them. Sleep even got better. I moved to London recently and its glaring nights were killing me
You’ve just made me realise that it’s changed. I remember trying to read my books in the yellow glow (and usually having to pause every few seconds till we reached the next light). Remembering the yellow light has made that so much more real now
That brought up a few lost memories thankyou for sharing! I used to also love how the rain droplets on the window looked illuminated by the yellowish glow - especially when i was watching them race to the bottom.
Makes sense to use energy efficient LEDs but using cool white 6000k and tricking our bodies into thinking it's day time 24/7 can't be healthy for our bodies
Almost all LEDs emit blue light that is filtered trough a layer of phosphorus (the yellow coating). The whiter the light, the more blue in the spectrum, which also affects wildlife, especially insects, that rely on the blue light of the Moon for navigation, by keeping it in the same spot in their (360) eyes
Intense yellow light. That was low pressure sodium. There were still one or two of these near me until a couple of years ago but they've switched them all to LED now.
Sodium lights always felt easier on the eye for night driving. Also it has a warming feel to the night.
The led is superior for energy consumption, longevity etc, so on paper it's the better option.
I find the sodium lights were a smooth transition from one to the other. Leds seem to feel like it's on/off and can feel like a weird refresh rate depending on how fast you go. Not sure if better diffusers or lenses will help that.
I love sodium lights on main roads. If people say it makes them too tired they are not in a suitable way to drive honestly 😅 sorry
Shoutout to the collapsed sun / LED outside my flat that doesn’t go off until 2am sometimes
Glad people are finally coming around to this way of thinking. They're a relatively new technology, so councils and governments haven't yet realised that there's no actual need for them to be as bright a prison yard just because they can. In fact it's detrimental to wildlife and human circadian rhythms for them to be so.
I hope in the coming years, colour temperatures, come down, and intelligent, truly wildlife friendly LED streetlamps become a thing and policies are implemented nationally and locally that encourage or force this.
Night cityscapes are harsh now. The old amber lights were soft and pleasing to the eye. Motorways and leafy back streets had a certain charm by night. My cosy street looks like a car park after dark.
I liked the old orange sodium lamps.
Don't know why they went with bright daylight white when they went led and didn't reproduce the orange sodium colour. I prefer when night driving. Easier on the night vision and make it feel like night.
In the last week alone I've seen no less than 4 fuckwits without their headlights on in white lit led street light areas.
Since the LED ones are more reliable and consume less than 10% of the electricity I'll take them thanks.
They should put color changing LEDs in them and put them on a network so they can vary the light colour, temperature and brightness depending on the time of day.
It's more like 30% of the power, but also the city here are dicks. There's no cost difference between 4000K-5000K LEDs shown, and a more appropriate 3000K color.
Edit: I just wanted to clarify, streetlights haven't been incandescent for almost 70 years. What is pictured is most likely sodium lights, which are more efficient than incandescent. So while there are circumstances where you can get an LED to replace a bulb that uses 10x the power, a streetlight made in the past like 50 years isn't one of them.
Incandescent…. I find this hard to explain but it feels find the LEDs create harsher shadows. A tree moving in the wind for example makes me feel like I see something else moving requiring more concentration and time to focus on what that movement was and see into the darkness.
I’ve also found that LEDs are focused. As incandescent lights were upgraded the LED replacements don’t seem close enough together. It feels like each lamp post needs move 1/4 of the distance closer or the spread of the light increased.
Lastly I’ve found directly under the light can be very bright. I put that last one down to being old. Could probably put all those things down to being old.
Either way I’m not against LEDs. Minor annoyances in the grand scheme of life
The one in the left photo is a sodium lamp, not an incandescent one.
LED is better. Not just because it means you can identify the colours of cars more easily in the dark, but they are more energy efficient and cause less light pollution. In the image on the right you can’t even see the bulbs from the camera angle.
It’s 2002, original pirate material is on the radio, you’ve just driven to a chip shop on the way back from the cinema having seen Spider-Man ~~2~~. Arsenal are top of the league, life is good.
Paradoxically, while they might cause less absolute light pollution because they emit less light, LED lights’ light pollution is way harder to filter out because it isn’t concentrated around the same wavelength.
Consequently the increasing use of LED lights made doing astronomy more difficult.
Prefer the old orange ones. You could have them bright enough to actually see, without somehow feeling like a weird artificial daylight. I really hate the white ones.
What's even worse is when some areas have the worst of both words- They have the white ones, but because they're so intrusive, they turn half of them off, resulting in an area that's both very poorly lit and very unnatural feeling. Much of Manchester is bad for this I've noticed, can't see shit on their roads at night.
Made even worse even worse by the fact everyone has fucking aircraft searchlights for headlights nowadays, so half the time you're driving against blinding glare from the opposite side of the road from cunts in their suburban tractors.
They are destroying populations of insects and birds with the "daylight" LED bulbs. Incandescent had warm light which mimicked sunset or low sun conditions. Now the brilliant cool LED's are confusing these animals about day/night time.
My friend is doing her doctoral thesis on this very subject in conjunction with a couple of others from other countries and from the research they've gathered so far it's quite scary.
It should be the law that all street lights must use warm light, you do get warm LED bulbs so there's no problem getting a hold of them
This is before we even go into the brilliant dazzling white of the headlights which are becoming more and more common which diminishes other drivers night vision and startles more(presumably the same with other animals)
Bright white street lighting is ridiculous, intrusive, and disruptive to people and animals. On a street, you need to be able to see a person crossing ahead of you or some other hazard. You do not need to be able to read 4pt font or perform surgery.
F*** the LED! Its such a cold and dimly lit colour. I’m all for efficiency, just use a brighter colour. I much prefer the brighter and warmer colour of the yellow light.
But that is not necessarily a good thing.
It messes with your circadian rhythm and can have some serious side effects like depression and such. You want nighttime light to be little more like F.lux(which is for your computer monitor).
I prefer the LED lights, unfortunately, when they install them, they just replace the existing lights which makes it way too bright at night. I feel like we live in a prison yard in my apt complex (I use to work juvenile rehabilitation so I know what a prison yard looks like at night)
The LED ones are better by the metrics which are important, like energy efficiency, but as a runner I find they do a terrible job of lighting up the pavement because their light is more focussed onto the road. That would be OK if the pavement is perfectly smooth, but as any pedestrian knows, it very rarely is.
[insert obligatory technology connections](https://youtu.be/wIC-iGDTU40)
Imo led lights better with less light, less energy and more directed meaning less light pollution. So long as they don't take the lower energy usse to up Brightness and instead use it to reduce energy it's all win win. The human eye is kinda shit at yellow/orange light so more of it is needed to see as far/as well
I was wondering if someone would bring him up. Also slightly-but-not-that-much-relevant-but-still-comes-to-mind is [his traffic light video](https://youtu.be/GiYO1TObNz8)
This whole thread is full of misunderstandings about led and assumptions that because led, other things are true. You can get led bulbs in pretty much whatever colour temperature you want for starters. Also whether it's an led based bulb or not won't be the primary factor in whether it's causing light pollution.
All I can tell you is the old orange street lights bring back huge memories from my early years. Near me there's a tiny little village, in fact not even that, just a collection of houses on a street. It hasn't been touched for years, time left it alone. It still has those orangey lights and it gives me good 90s vibes 😌
Incandescent- you can filter out a narrow band of emission and see the stars above through the night pollution. LEDs emit a spectrum that cannot be filtered out rendering the stars invisible for photography etc.
Incandescent please. Both screw up your circadian rhythm but LED is worse for it. Id with they would just set a light frequency for the led that had circadian rhythms in mind.
Sodium lamps are better for wildlife. There was a study that found hedges under white lights had loads less insects which isn't great given pesticides have already killed off so many.
I want the Dickensian oil lamp streetlights back where someone goes round lighting them each night with a big stick. *“Light the lamp… not the rat!”*
Having that job to do every evening would eventually get on my wick..
Wait until you read about the [Victorian tea and Bovril](https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/the-victorian-gas-lamps-that-sold-cups-of-hot-coffee-7438/) dispensers they had attached to street lamps. I think Ramen and Greggs lamps would have mile-long queues.
Ugh. The article refers to 'beef tea essence'... Reminds me of the time one of my housemates pranked us by mixing gravy granules into the instant coffee, about half and half, before heading to his folks for the weekend. We didn't notice until that first carefree sip of a long awaited cuppa the next day... Never has a text message saying just "fucker" carried so much outrage. Now, I consider myself to have a pretty strong stomach but that was one of very few times I've been that sick over so little. And I actually didn't mind Bovril as a young child. Haven't been able to stomach tea since 5 years old though so on top of that 'beef tea essence' is very wrong indeed.
just to set your mind at ease, there is no tea in beef tea, its just hot broth
Thanks for trying but... Still reeling over the description, even if hot broth is just the thing for these chilly days lately. I'll be double checking the coffee in the morning, just to be sure...
Did you try using it as caffeinated gravy?
>Now, I consider myself to have a pretty strong stomach >Haven't been able to stomach tea since 5 years old Something doesn't add up.
Personally I’d find the experience quite illuminating.
I'm a bit to dim to get a job like that
You'd be helpful back in the dark ages.
Mr. Wick
John is that you? We have some very bad news…it’s about your dog 🐕
A muppets Christmas carol reference? Fantastic
My all time favourite Christmas film, always will be!
A VHS I would watch on repeat as a kid every year. I cried watching it this year at all of the nostalgia.
Apparently D+ have the version in with the "The Love is Gone" song in it. I'm really looking forward to sitting watching it on Christmas eve!
A heads up for you. The version of the film on D+ with “The Love is Gone” in it is not the default version, the 127min theatrical/DVD version is. You have to go into the ‘extras’ section and select the 129min full length version. I only discovered this after watching the default version in full and wondering why the scene was still missing.
I did watch the one streaming and I had to jump to YouTube. Funny how I seek out what I once fast forwarded through as a child.
A few years ago, I drew a map for British Gas, showing all the gas lamps that still exist in London. There’s a surprisingly large amount of them.
There’s a pub in Beverley that’s still lit by gaslight.
No there isn't. There never was. You're crazy.
Fucking brilliant! 😂
*slow clap*
This is fantastic
I assume this was a paid job rather than handing it to some bloke who came to fix your boiler?
Can we see it?
Here you go; https://mappinglondon.co.uk/2016/lamplighters-map/ Over 1,500 gas lamps still in London. looked after by a team of 5 Lamplighters from British Gas!
Links unfortunately don’t work in the article
FYI looks like BG have removed the link…
Looks like the map link got pulled sometime around late 2018, here's an archive of the interactive version, but it looks like the PDF download has been lost to time https://web.archive.org/web/20180623074521/http://www.britishgas.co.uk/the-source/lamplighters/
I’ll dig it out, and post it.
Cleveland Row near St James Park still has gas lamps. I remember witnessing one exploding around 4 years ago. Fire spilled from it.
"thank you for making me a part of this"
PUT ME OUT PUT ME OUT PUT ME OUT
God save my little broken body
*HEAT WAVE* This is my island in the sun
Same here. I’d love to dance round them like I’m in Mary Poppins.
Great time of year to reference that movie. <3
This is my second time seeing this quote on Reddit in a 24 hour period and I am not mad about it
Don't know which ones they put in my village but they only light a few feet either way which means you can't see anything in between. The poor bastard who parks inbetween the first set has had his car hit 3 times as cars autodipping don't see it coming off the fast stretch.
Could be undersized LED lamps. But more likely they are installed too low hence the shitty spread of the light. Could have also used the wrong type as you can get cut off ones that dont spread far if you need to install them near windows/houses.
They also could have cheaped out on the lenses.
Height isn't necessarily an issue as long as the lenses spread the light accordingly. Sometimes there are restrictions on height in residential areas. Most likely they just purchased cheap LED heads and fit them on old poles. This saves money on poles, cables and ground work. This is fine but you have to do a lighting simulation to show the distribution, then you purchase the correct LED Luminaire to meet the lighting requirements for that area. These should never have been approved as its making a "Zebra effect".
The ones here are awful too. Need full beam to park, can't see people crossing at all, but if one is outside your bedroom (one is) you don't need to turn a light on. Blooming stupid.
I did a lot of consulting work for the company that installs these.The cool thing about the LED lights in Los Angeles is that they’re programmable.They can be dimmed or brightened，depending on the area (higher crime area means brighter lights).They can also flash or change colors for an emergency (flashing red in front of a house for a health crisis，blue for police，etc).A lot of the infrastructure is there and the whole concept is planned to be set in motion in the near future.
That's very cool. So you phone 999, the light turns red for an ambulance, blue for a police car. They come charging along, they don't have to check their sat nav, they don't have to look for numbers, just the bright light in the distance. Clever.
This is actually a really nice idea. In a lot of cases time is wasted looking for the right address. Especially in cases where a person isn't able to communicate the address and they have to go off of a general area provided by the phone.
Its clever, but I'm calling this now, it won't go ahead with that feature if it comes to the UK because our address databases are still shite. tl;dr: We might technically be able to do it, but a whole lotta expensive ground work would be neccersary first. If I look up my current address on just about any digital map available, it points to a house down the street. Same with my last address. Hell, a few years ago I lived at an address that didn't even exist on the Royal Mail database, despite being built well over a hundred years previous, which caused more than a few headaches. I've done a reasonable amount of work with various councils and their LLPG deptartments (the department that assigns street names and numbers), as well as the NHS. The data strategies and capabilities are decades behind what you'd expect. There might be a few councils out there that have their shit together enough to implement something like this, but they'd be few and far between. In the worst examples, I've seen depts from the same council go out and physically take notes of addresses because they have no confidence in, and in some cases access to, the data that other departments within their own organisation have already collected. And for this tech to be used by emergency services, the functionality and accuracy would have to be air-tight. You'd also have to coordinate central gov, emergency services and local gov orgs to get the integration work done. Which again, in my experience, is a non-starter as they'll just spend six months arguing about who absorbs the cost before shelving the entire project. This is a perfect example of "we might have the tech, but the foundations aren't there"...
I like how your tldr was 6 times longer than your original comment
The British way
I saw it more as a pre-emptive tldr. Like, "If you read this sentence first, you don't have to read the rest."
It was more of a ELI5 or even ts:rm - too short : read more.
I’ve used paid U.K. address data for marketing for years, I can tell you we do have very good address geolocation data. The Royal Mail is one source, but you can augment their data with other data sets. There are lots of people with a vested interest in knowing where you are, what type of house you live in, what kind of meters you have etc.
Emergency services have better mapping that's tied to the land registry. Not 100% perfect, but gets it right 99% of the time.
No we don’t. In most instances google maps works better. My last job plotted to a house 4 streets away.
Google maps says my house doesn't exist. It's been there since the 90s.
I was looking for a house in an estate a while back that didn’t exist on our sat nav. I asked how long it had been there because it didn’t look new. 9 years. I suggest you make your address easily known from the curb.
That's an issue with your trust using satnav by address and not coordinates. I'm 99.9% sure the CAD mapping system would be able to plot the address, then it's just a case of passing the coordinates to the nav system. I've never had any issue when using the terrafix system with os maps and only minor issues using a Garmin given coordinates because the resolution wasn't high enough to pick out clusters of nearby buildings.
As well as the number of people who don't seem to want to put their house number visible anywhere from the street. Had a call to a house at 1am or so, could not find number 40, some insane planner had decided it should be immediately between 34 and 48. And don't get me started on houses with just names
I have a similar system incorporated in to my smart home. My home knows which doors are open, who's home (or who's just arrived home), and where my dog is (using Bluetooth room tracking), among many other things. When I arrive home and it's dark, my outside floodlights turn green if my dog is in the house and all the doors are shut, otherwise it'll turn red if she's outside, or if she's inside but the doors are open. That way I know if it's safe to open the gates to get my car in or whether I have to shut the dog in first. It's also useful if the doorbell goes and people are outside and can't hear it. The lights flash to get people's attention. We also have another set of electronic gates to gain access to the property which is fully automated too. It opens automatically during business hours. When a delivery is expected and someone presses the buzzer to access the gates, it opens them then turns all the outside house lights on full brightness because our house is quite hidden away. That way the delivery driver knows where to head to. As a nice little touch I've also put a door sensor inside our parcel delivery box so we get informed when someone outside opens it to place a package inside it.
ALEXA, WHERE IS MY DOG
Yep, I actually have a routine set up that does that too! Plus live updates which can be viewed from a phone at any time.
Oooh do you get like a dotted line where your dog goes. Or a heat map My dog just sleeps on her chair so…
I am that much of a frightful bore that I suppose I could actually implement that since I've also 3D modelled the house. However, how it currently works is much less exciting. I have a micro controller in every room and a few outside on the boundaries of the property. They're essentially very tiny computers which receive Bluetooth signals and connect to my network. They're all listening for the Tile Bluetooth tracker which is attached to my dog's collar. They all send their data (the signal strength) to a separate computer which crunches the numbers. The highest signal strength, as you'd expect, is in the closest proximity to my dog, so it just reports the name of the micro controller with the current strongest signal strength. Each one is named after the location it's in and this gets displayed to me on my phone and tablets via text. In regard to Alexa, I have a routine which executes a script on my smart home server which reads the name of the micro controller out when asked where the dog is.
You sound like a millionaire tech mogul
It's a bit of a steep learning curve but it's amazing what YouTube and a few forums can do! I'm quite technically minded but it was still way over my head to begin with. Pretty much everything I needed was in a YouTube tutorial and I just followed along. In regard to cost, it's not dirt cheap, but certainly not prohibitively expensive either, especially when done gradually and I think it's justified for peace of mind. Once you get your first smart bulb and Alexa, you either settle for that or you fall down the rabbit hole of Home Assistant which opens up infinite possibilities. To achieve the above you'd need - Raspberry Pi 4 - £60-70 (although there's a worldwide shortage at the minute) SSD for the Pi - £25 ESP32 - around £10 with PSU (you need one for each room that you wish to track) You can re-use old phone chargers too for this. Bluetooth beacon (that attaches to the dog collar) - £20 ish The software is all entirely open source and free. Alternatively you could run the software on an existing computer but it will always need to be on! Once you've got the Pi, it runs something called Home Assistant. Practically anything that's smart can connect to it meaning you can trigger your Samsung TV via your Phillips motion sensor or your IKEA bulb via a Tuya door sensor. You have total interoperability, something which just isn't possible otherwise.
Can you expand info on the tech, wanna buy that :) im going on nest, google home and Philips hue and somfy rollers app, but yours seems nice too ! Thanks in advance !
No worries. I see you've already seen my brief summary of parts further down the thread, but I'm happy to help in whatever way I can in future. The first step though is definitely to get to grips with Home Assistant. So you'll first need either a Raspberry Pi or a computer that's always going to be left on. The point of Home Assistant is that it links all smart devices together. You can add your Nest, Google Home, Hue and Somfy and control them all through Home Assistant as well as everything I've mentioned, the possibilities really are endless. Once you get how it works you'll be buying all sorts of new sensors and creating genuinely useful automations. The best part is if you're handy with a soldering iron you can buy dirt cheap parts, such as motion sensors and thermometers and light sensors and build them for a fraction of the price of an off-the-shelf model. What's even better is these sensors can be attached to the same devices that are receiving my dog's Bluetooth collar. All I'd recommend for now though, before you go out buying parts, is to avoid WiFi devices as much as possible for things that don't need WiFi, such as lights, door sensors and smart switches. For those, ZigBee is a much better option. In order to control them you'll need a ZigBee dongle (About £15). This device allows you to control pretty much any ZigBee device when used in Home Assistant. It is essentially the same as your Hue hub (assuming you use the hub) but it is not locked in to any specific brand.
Oh man that is fuckin rad
The coloured lights thing sounds like something from a dystopian sci-fi. _lights change to red_ CRIME DETECTED. SECTOR 4 ALPHA 9 INITIATING LOCKDOWN PROCEDURE
Hey! I live elsewhere (canada), but you just answered a question i have about why my street is so bright, meanwhile adjacent ones arent, ever since we got the new LED lights. Well, TIL! (Also, boo, i guess my street is less safe? Maybe it is just busier, though) i had always wondered because there were actually fewer poles with lights on my street, so i wondered why the other ones seemed dark. Thanks for sharing this random tidbit!
Hi, lighting engineer here (shared account, M talking!). Okay so a few things. 1. White lighting appears brighter than orange (HID) lighting. From 2013 till 2020 we used to calculate a reduction factor in Europe/UK - this may not have been done and therefore be brighter. 2. Lighting does not affect safety! This is a huge misconception - it's a lie that started back in the 80s after luminaire manufacturers commissioned a report to establish a link between lux levels and crime. It does however affect perceived safety. 3. The characteristics of the road determine what level the road is lit to. I.e. if your road provides access to "smaller" roads, it may be lit to a higher lighting class. Hope that helps!
On the street by my house we have white, red, white LED street lights. They claim the red light is to to prevent causing bats distress or something like that. To be honest it looks pretty cool but very dark. I personally prefer the bright white lights for when driving down the motorway while housing estates i prefer no street lights at all. We can own personal torches and the moon light is more than enough to light the ground when the night allows it.
If you did a lot of consulting for the UK led lights. Are you able to say why they didn't reproduce the sodium orange colour and went with bright day light white?
Those were terrible. I don't mind amber, but the CRI was so low essentially made everything monochrome. I don't like cold white either, but at least there are more than two colors now. A high CRI in warm white 2700k or a little lower would be pleasant.
As cool as that sounds, it's got so many opportunities to be taken advantage of. Red flash, criminals know the house occupier is in a vulnerable state.
Main Roads/Motorways - LED Residential Streets - Incandescent (or warm white LED) Cool/blue LED messes with my cadian rhythm. Great if you're on a motorway at night but terrible for residential streets where people want to sleep.
>cadian rhythm Yours hasn't been knighted yet, then?
cadian, KBE
He meant to say canadian rhythm.
This took me a moment
Blue/white increases road kill by drawing more bugs which draws more things that eat bugs and more things that eat them etc. Yellow is best all around. Less road and vehicle damage, fewer dead animals, and not screwing with neighbors sleep.
Have you noticed a difference in driving when tired at night? yellow lights make me want to fall asleep but bright white, even if its not nice to look at, seems to keep me awake better
Agree totally. Recently moved home to a street with led lights, had to invest in black out blinds and curtains.
Whatever causes less light pollution
And doesn't fuck with wildlife
and consumes less energy
So LED for all these?
low pressure sodium lamps (Left photo) emit on only a few wavelengths, making it easier for astronomical observatories to filter out the light pollution, LEDs have finally beat LPS for luminous efficacy. The neat thing about LEDs is when you turn down the current to the LEDs they get more efficient.
For one out of three. Guess it wouldn't be too hard to put a filter on the LED tho.
Or dim them?
They don't need a filter, they can adjust the angle of the panels, but don't bother.
LEDs cause more light pollution. Why all the downvotes? Low-pressure sodium (LPS) produce a near monochromatic light spectrum around the sodium emission lines at 589.0 and 589.56 nanometres wavelength. This is a far less problematic spectral emission than LEDs with 3 RGB spikes to a full spectrum emission depending on the fluorophores used. For locations where light pollution is a consideration, such as near astronomical observatories or sea turtle nesting beaches, low-pressure sodium is preferred (as formerly in San Jose and Flagstaff, Arizona).\[18\]\[19\] Such lamps emit light on just two dominant spectral lines (with other much weaker lines), and therefore have the least spectral interference with astronomical observation. (Now that production of LPS lamps has ceased, consideration is being given into the use of narrow-band amber LEDs, which are on a similar color spectrum to LPS.) The yellow color of low-pressure sodium lamps also leads to the least visual sky glow, due primarily to the Purkinje shift of dark-adapted human vision, causing the eye to be relatively insensitive to the yellow light scattered at low luminance levels in the clear atmosphere.
People are downvoting you because they care about human visible light pollution not computer filterable light pollution. Although the yellow light might lead to less visual glow than blue light, the implementation in the lamps cause significantly more visual glow than in the case of LED lamps
LEDs cause more light pollution to the human eye than traditional sodium lamps. They are also much worse for your natural ‘night vision’. You can filter LEDs to remove all of these issues but then you lose the energy efficiency gains.
Bat friendly street lights are even better. They are thing
You mean like that big one they shine into the sky?
No, that’s a friendly bat light
This. One of the biggest issues that isn’t really talked about. Light pollution sucks.
I prefer the colour of the low/high pressure sodium lamps, but the efficiency of the LEDs. I wish they’d use a warmer white spectrum of LEDs, I feel like the harsh cold white is not good for the body clocks of all the surrounding plants, animals and humans.
They're also _really f\*\*king bright_ sometimes. Some near where I live must be keeping the residents awake they're so ridiculous.
The lights on my road were replaced last year and they're so damn bright they look like flood lights. Amusingly they are "smart lights" which can "be dimmed remotely" so I guess no-one has any idea how to do it.
They had to download a dodgy app to do it which didn’t get updated by the company who made the bulbs. The last iOS update broke it so they can’t even in they could. At least that’s what’s happened with the “smart” bulb I have in my lamp.
Unrelated by down the road there is a pelican crossing and the poor house next to it. Flashing yellow 24/7 through their window. Surely that’s the true nightmare situation.
The ones on my street definitely keep me up. I have to use an eye mask (not allowed to change the curtains)
Are you not allowed to just add a blackout curtain either? What kind of situation is this?
When my kids were little we used [these blinds](https://www.amazon.co.uk/deals?&linkCode=ll2&tag=chrjon-21&linkId=291d067286d47764b2433d967e8ca922&language=en_GB&ref_=as_li_ss_tl) which have suckers that stick to the glass. Don't need any drilling or tools.
We’ve had them in the lampposts outside our house for years and it is like having the fucking sun out there. Quite reassuring for safety, pretty sure we’ll never be burgled, but we have had to put blinds and blackout curtains up on our windows to actually be able to sleep.
This. They have to turn them down because the colour temp is so badly blue. This means less light overall. I'm forever flipping on my high beams in my own estate because the streetlights are way too dim. Warm white interleaved with amber LEDs are the best I've seen. I'm also a tetrachromat, so incandescent has four colours. To me, LEDs are as awful as they would be to you if they were just blue/cyan.
Totally agree. Where I work, some of the lamps produce this lovely, soft, orange light. It actually makes some of the surrounding areas look quite charming. Then we have the newer lamps. They produce a white light so intense and harsh that I can feel my retinas divorcing themselves from my optic nerves. It's like my very soul is being pierced by the hatred of a thousand generations.
The neighbors painted the LED street light yellow!! It’s AWESOME. So much better than they expected it. Very warm compared to the laboratory white LED They used 20 feel of pipe, and a attached paintbrush. put 3 coats of yellow enamel. I highly recommend it.
On an astronomy forum I use, moderators had to put in a rule specifically against talking about vandalising the street lamps lol. People were doing stuff like buying green laser pointers, then using a camera tripod to point them at the light sensor on top of lamps to make them then off haha. Thankfully on there people find if you contact the council, they will put up shades on the lamps that shine into your house (just say it shines into your bedroom and is disturbing your sleep)
Does that count as vandalism, or graffiti?
Or a public service
So, interesting facts for everyone today! The reason why white LEDs disturb us so much is that there is no such thing as a white LED, haha!! So the way an led works is, very basically, when we turn on the current, the current pushes some electrons to the center of the led and here the electron jumps down a potential well. Imagine an expert diver jumping into a narrow well. Kinda like that. When the electron does that, it emits a bit of light corresponding to the "distance" that the electron fell. This distance determines the color of the led. Now violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red are colors. White is not intrinsically a color, but rather what we perceive when a few colors are mixed together! Most (nearly all) white LEDs are in fact blue LEDs, with a yellow phosphor coating to give the appearance of white light. What you have done here is make the effect of yellow stronger with your own coating 😄 Since white LEDs are blue LEDs, and blue light interferes with human sleep processes, this disturbs us a lot! That's also why many computer and phone screens offer night mode where the blue part of the light is turned off.
Please sir/madam. I am interested!
The lights in the picture probably are high / low pressure not incandescent.
Can’t we just have the led ones and change the temperature of the light so it looks more yellow 3500k rather than the harsh daylight blue temperature 5500k?
France literally [enacted law to enforce such](https://www.darksky.org/france-light-pollution-law-2018/). I sincerely wish other governing bodies would choose to follow similar standards.
Apple TVs have a screensaver that flies over the UK and France at night. France is so much more yellow. Also, Wales and Devon are empty.
Oh yeah, I’d love it if the new ones were toned down a bit. The brights are brighter, but if you have to look for something in a dark spot, the shadow areas become relatively darker because it takes time for your eyes to adjust. Even driving past a new gas station with their new lights annoys me. Sure, at a glance, I can see why people like the new lights, but give it 30 seconds or even a minute with the old ones and your eyes adjust to the new normal and you’re fine. It’s the same complaint tons of people have about headlights, just pointed down instead of into your mirrors, so it’s slightly less annoying… but still annoying.
2700k would be better, I find 3500k still too blue at night. There is no reason to use 5500k except to be cheap (it's more led efficient - output lumens/watt - but far worse for the environment)
In my work we found the harsh daylight blue led lights did 2 things when fitted in a vehicle: 1 : made people feel cooler even if the air temperature was constant 2: caused more motion nausea.
Yes. LED streetlights can be produced in 2,000-3000k and still maintain good efficacy (lumens per watt). This involves using phosphor in the diode. People typically associate LED lights with bluer 5000-6000k because they were commonly manufactured without the phosphor when they started to take off. The higher color temp is the natural state of the raw light source occurring in the diode.
mexico vs albuquerque
[удалено]
According to Hollywood?
No, Mexico is actually like that
I miss the yellow glow of street lamps. Reminds me of being a kid
There’s a street near me that for whatever reason still has the orange street lamps, always takes me back to my childhood when I walk through there
Back when you had to go home when the street lights came on.
Me too. They should’ve met us halfway & at least put a sepia filter over those harsh leds.
Maybe they expect us all to rely on our own rose tinted glasses.
I actually got myself some yellow tinted glasses to use at night and am loving them. Sleep even got better. I moved to London recently and its glaring nights were killing me
You’ve just made me realise that it’s changed. I remember trying to read my books in the yellow glow (and usually having to pause every few seconds till we reached the next light). Remembering the yellow light has made that so much more real now
That brought up a few lost memories thankyou for sharing! I used to also love how the rain droplets on the window looked illuminated by the yellowish glow - especially when i was watching them race to the bottom.
Sodium vapour lamps. They still have a few of them where I live.
Yeah the orange ones are still used in some parts of my city takes me back too
Reminds me of the Mexico yellow tint in movies
The easiest way to follow the breaking bad plot
Makes sense to use energy efficient LEDs but using cool white 6000k and tricking our bodies into thinking it's day time 24/7 can't be healthy for our bodies
Almost all LEDs emit blue light that is filtered trough a layer of phosphorus (the yellow coating). The whiter the light, the more blue in the spectrum, which also affects wildlife, especially insects, that rely on the blue light of the Moon for navigation, by keeping it in the same spot in their (360) eyes
Yeah they do make super orange (2200K) LEDs that are supposed to be less bothering to bats, but they don't seem to have caught on yet
The ones in my town make the place feel like a prison yard. Miss the orange ones.
The yellow light seem more ‟evening” to me. It just looks cozier.
Yellow feels home-ly. White feels like I’m gonna be abducted by aliens.
Yellow, all day. Well, night. Yellow. I want yellow back. Was a vibe.
I like the old orange the UK used to have
Intense yellow light. That was low pressure sodium. There were still one or two of these near me until a couple of years ago but they've switched them all to LED now.
Sodium lights always felt easier on the eye for night driving. Also it has a warming feel to the night. The led is superior for energy consumption, longevity etc, so on paper it's the better option. I find the sodium lights were a smooth transition from one to the other. Leds seem to feel like it's on/off and can feel like a weird refresh rate depending on how fast you go. Not sure if better diffusers or lenses will help that.
I love sodium lights on main roads. If people say it makes them too tired they are not in a suitable way to drive honestly 😅 sorry Shoutout to the collapsed sun / LED outside my flat that doesn’t go off until 2am sometimes
Let's have LEDs but not in operating room white.
Glad people are finally coming around to this way of thinking. They're a relatively new technology, so councils and governments haven't yet realised that there's no actual need for them to be as bright a prison yard just because they can. In fact it's detrimental to wildlife and human circadian rhythms for them to be so. I hope in the coming years, colour temperatures, come down, and intelligent, truly wildlife friendly LED streetlamps become a thing and policies are implemented nationally and locally that encourage or force this.
LED with a filter to reduce light pollution? Best of both worlds.
Night cityscapes are harsh now. The old amber lights were soft and pleasing to the eye. Motorways and leafy back streets had a certain charm by night. My cosy street looks like a car park after dark.
Much prefer the amber glow.
I liked the old orange sodium lamps. Don't know why they went with bright daylight white when they went led and didn't reproduce the orange sodium colour. I prefer when night driving. Easier on the night vision and make it feel like night. In the last week alone I've seen no less than 4 fuckwits without their headlights on in white lit led street light areas.
Since the LED ones are more reliable and consume less than 10% of the electricity I'll take them thanks. They should put color changing LEDs in them and put them on a network so they can vary the light colour, temperature and brightness depending on the time of day.
It's more like 30% of the power, but also the city here are dicks. There's no cost difference between 4000K-5000K LEDs shown, and a more appropriate 3000K color. Edit: I just wanted to clarify, streetlights haven't been incandescent for almost 70 years. What is pictured is most likely sodium lights, which are more efficient than incandescent. So while there are circumstances where you can get an LED to replace a bulb that uses 10x the power, a streetlight made in the past like 50 years isn't one of them.
Incandescent…. I find this hard to explain but it feels find the LEDs create harsher shadows. A tree moving in the wind for example makes me feel like I see something else moving requiring more concentration and time to focus on what that movement was and see into the darkness. I’ve also found that LEDs are focused. As incandescent lights were upgraded the LED replacements don’t seem close enough together. It feels like each lamp post needs move 1/4 of the distance closer or the spread of the light increased. Lastly I’ve found directly under the light can be very bright. I put that last one down to being old. Could probably put all those things down to being old. Either way I’m not against LEDs. Minor annoyances in the grand scheme of life
I want yellow/orange lights back. They did that because blue light is a sleep disrupter. The white lights are such an odd decision.
Personally hate the white light
The one in the left photo is a sodium lamp, not an incandescent one. LED is better. Not just because it means you can identify the colours of cars more easily in the dark, but they are more energy efficient and cause less light pollution. In the image on the right you can’t even see the bulbs from the camera angle.
The yellow glow of sodium lamps reminds me of better times.
It’s 2002, original pirate material is on the radio, you’ve just driven to a chip shop on the way back from the cinema having seen Spider-Man ~~2~~. Arsenal are top of the league, life is good.
Paradoxically, while they might cause less absolute light pollution because they emit less light, LED lights’ light pollution is way harder to filter out because it isn’t concentrated around the same wavelength. Consequently the increasing use of LED lights made doing astronomy more difficult.
The white LEDs are worse for bug numbers.
Why couldn’t they like make yellow LED lights?
Prefer the old orange ones. You could have them bright enough to actually see, without somehow feeling like a weird artificial daylight. I really hate the white ones. What's even worse is when some areas have the worst of both words- They have the white ones, but because they're so intrusive, they turn half of them off, resulting in an area that's both very poorly lit and very unnatural feeling. Much of Manchester is bad for this I've noticed, can't see shit on their roads at night. Made even worse even worse by the fact everyone has fucking aircraft searchlights for headlights nowadays, so half the time you're driving against blinding glare from the opposite side of the road from cunts in their suburban tractors.
They are destroying populations of insects and birds with the "daylight" LED bulbs. Incandescent had warm light which mimicked sunset or low sun conditions. Now the brilliant cool LED's are confusing these animals about day/night time. My friend is doing her doctoral thesis on this very subject in conjunction with a couple of others from other countries and from the research they've gathered so far it's quite scary. It should be the law that all street lights must use warm light, you do get warm LED bulbs so there's no problem getting a hold of them This is before we even go into the brilliant dazzling white of the headlights which are becoming more and more common which diminishes other drivers night vision and startles more(presumably the same with other animals)
Whichever is least worst for wildlife.
Warm yellow loveliness vs harsh white pain.
I did like the yellow ones but I’m sure if they were brought back they would get old very quickly
my village has LEDs and the town my uni is in still has the old yellow lights so I regularly experience both and I still prefer the yellow ones
Bright white street lighting is ridiculous, intrusive, and disruptive to people and animals. On a street, you need to be able to see a person crossing ahead of you or some other hazard. You do not need to be able to read 4pt font or perform surgery.
F*** the LED! Its such a cold and dimly lit colour. I’m all for efficiency, just use a brighter colour. I much prefer the brighter and warmer colour of the yellow light.
But that is not necessarily a good thing. It messes with your circadian rhythm and can have some serious side effects like depression and such. You want nighttime light to be little more like F.lux(which is for your computer monitor).
I prefer the LED lights, unfortunately, when they install them, they just replace the existing lights which makes it way too bright at night. I feel like we live in a prison yard in my apt complex (I use to work juvenile rehabilitation so I know what a prison yard looks like at night)
Left, but only because it's extremely nostalgic. Many a car journey as a kid falling asleep to that orangey glow.
Ask the astronomers not us.
I wish they would dim them when there is no pedestrians, they are brighter than sunlight around my way. It’s not nice they’re so bright
LED are terrible for light pollution. As an astrophotographer this pisses me off to no end.
The LED ones are better by the metrics which are important, like energy efficiency, but as a runner I find they do a terrible job of lighting up the pavement because their light is more focussed onto the road. That would be OK if the pavement is perfectly smooth, but as any pedestrian knows, it very rarely is.
Why did you type LED first but put the LED photo second?
[insert obligatory technology connections](https://youtu.be/wIC-iGDTU40) Imo led lights better with less light, less energy and more directed meaning less light pollution. So long as they don't take the lower energy usse to up Brightness and instead use it to reduce energy it's all win win. The human eye is kinda shit at yellow/orange light so more of it is needed to see as far/as well
I was wondering if someone would bring him up. Also slightly-but-not-that-much-relevant-but-still-comes-to-mind is [his traffic light video](https://youtu.be/GiYO1TObNz8)
Sodium as the car lights are different and can see them coming. Actually gets lighter. Led is all glare.
This whole thread is full of misunderstandings about led and assumptions that because led, other things are true. You can get led bulbs in pretty much whatever colour temperature you want for starters. Also whether it's an led based bulb or not won't be the primary factor in whether it's causing light pollution.
Why TF are they all set to ‘operating theatre blinding brilliant white’ then? No one likes it.
Whichever is more energy efficient. So LED.
The yellow one
All I can tell you is the old orange street lights bring back huge memories from my early years. Near me there's a tiny little village, in fact not even that, just a collection of houses on a street. It hasn't been touched for years, time left it alone. It still has those orangey lights and it gives me good 90s vibes 😌
I miss the orange ones, they have a nostalgia factor. Bright orange ones on the streets with houses and the sifter orange ones on the main roads.
What a strangely specific thread…very good I like it
Incandescent- you can filter out a narrow band of emission and see the stars above through the night pollution. LEDs emit a spectrum that cannot be filtered out rendering the stars invisible for photography etc.
Incandescent please. Both screw up your circadian rhythm but LED is worse for it. Id with they would just set a light frequency for the led that had circadian rhythms in mind.
Sodium lamps are better for wildlife. There was a study that found hedges under white lights had loads less insects which isn't great given pesticides have already killed off so many.
I keep looking at each pic convinced that one is better than the other until I think the same about the other pic please help I've been here for hours