Ban, outlaw and confiscate LED yard lights!

The BBQ Pit
1

Fuck, I hate these things. They seem perfectly benign and gosh-a-roonie, they’re ee-ko-logical and everything… and totally fucking useless except to screw up neighborhoods at night. They don’t put out enough light to actually see anything, they just create oddly-shaped blobs of light that are disorienting, especially on uneven terrain, because you often can’t see any ground level to give the view a horizon. On top of that, the light from them is usually the ugly bluish-gray, nothing warm or comforting or nice.

So you buy your six- or twelve- or seventy-three-pack at Sam’s or Costco or Home Despot and you stick the fucking alien potato mashers all over your yard, and you go inside, hopping up and down with squee, waiting for it to Get! Dark! so you can see your new toys… and then you finally realize it IS dark and your new acquisitions are just unpleasantly colorless glow-blobs floating around in the darkness that is your yard.

Oh, well, don’t cost nothing to run, so there they stay. Fucking up the night for everyone within line of sight, taking away sweet summer darkness for a sort of shitty high school stage set with “stars” all over the background.

Fuck these turd-stakes.
We live in the goddamned woods of New England, and we are surrounded by city-working insurance agents who not only come home, take off their ties, put on their flannels and ride their quads around to each other’s houses, but feel some need to light up the night like Times Square. Pole lights that would make people squint in Las Vegas. Spotlights, both manual and motion-triggered, that would serve in any prison-break movie. (And, of course, aimed from the house to the furthest property lines, meaning our bedroom window is within the cone of at least four of them.)

And now the surly neighbor next door, the one occupying the center of the only dark stretch left around us (except that he leaves lights on on every floor - 3 - all night, every night) has put in a dozen of these alien, cyanotic dull glowbastards, so my last nice view of the dark night woods, with a few cheery house lights twinkling in the distance and stars above, is occupied by a permanent fleet of ghostly blue-gray UFOs… all fucking night, every night, because while the pole lights and floodlights get turned off at midnight or two or four, these eco-faker-fuckers NEVER go off.

God, I wish I was as good with a sniper rifle as I am in Borderlands. “Gotta get some whiskey and a gun, my dear. Some whiskey and a gun.”

2

I’m with you on this one. What the hell is wrong with darkness?

3

You are obviously unaware of the number of criminals running loose in the woods of New England. Why, it’s a wonder the OP survived as long as he did, prior to his neighbors selflessly protecting him and the rest of the neighborhood.

4

Yes, you’re the smartest person and the most aware consumer in the known universe. You should probably just board up your windows and hide inside (I’m sure you know the best tools for that too, that the rest of us haven’t heard of because we’re too busy being gosh-wowed by TV ads) because somewhere out there, someone is doing something you wouldn’t and thereby proving their inferiority to you.

5

Where do you get the ones that stay on all night? Ours run out of juice just a couple of hours after it gets dark.

6

Nothing, unless I’m crashing into my car door or the side of the house because there is absolutely no freakin’ light whatsoever in my driveway when I get home late.

I’ve got a half dozen of the things along the side of house/driveway so I don’t injure myself after working the late shift or when departing for the very early shift. Of course, that’s half a dozen tucked away, not a whole freakin’ lawn full of 'em.

Also, found out during a power failure that they can be pulled out of the ground and provide sufficient illumination inside a completely dark house so as to navigate to the toilet without self-injury, and without the risk of fire posed by candles, and without having to find fresh batteries to make them work.

YMMV. I agree they can be overdone, but for some of us they aren’t completely useless.

7

Eh, I kind of like them. They (at least the ones I see every night) are just bright enough to provide some ambient light without being too distracting. I’ve been thinking of getting one or two to put by the shed so I can see from the house whether I remembered to close the shed door.

8

Any chance of photos? I don’t know what these look like.

9

We had them outside our house but they kept getting stolen so we gave up.

10

Tis where The Evil lurks. My place is dark indeed.

11

The color-changing ones are a delightful combination of cute and tacky. And out in the country, I’ve seen the regular ones used to light the edges of narrow driveways that pass over drainage ditches.

Yes, I got a bunch of the color-changing ones on clearance at Lowe’s last year. They’re all in my backyard though. :smiley:

12

When we moved to the mountain town we live in, from a large city, our neighbors politely mentioned that keeping the outside lights off was not exactly required, but highly desired. They were right, night time is quite the view when it is dark.
We then moved into a new house on the other side of the valley where the night sky was not quite as valued as 'look at my house!!! the lights !!!“. The Xmas lights are a fucking night mare. I could see one house a mile away with lights all over a rectangular frame, all I could think when I saw it was ’ there is the temple of gozar the gozarian”

ok not quite the same as LED nigh lights, but not everything needs to be lit all the time.

13

So someone who payed actual money for the property next to yours is decorating that property as she sees fit. You didn’t pay anything for that land, even though you could have bought this center of the only dark stretch left around you when the current owner did. And you think that you should have the right to nice view of the dark night woods on that land. And you are verbally abusing the person who did buy it for utilising for the perfectly legal purpose that she enjoys most.

Is that about right?

14

Stick your head in a bucket of shit. I expect you’ll find it plenty dark.

15

From a purely practical standpoint; we have zero neighbors and have to walk from the house to barn after dark all the time. There’s a motion activated spotlight by the barn, but walking from the house to the point where that lights is rough with a new moon.

16

…so do they not generate enough light to see anything, or do they light the place up like Times Square?

17

The LED thingies don’t generate enough light to see anything. It’s Amateur Barbarian’s bright red, inflamed ass that lights the place up like Times Square. Do try to keep up.

18

The previous owners of our house had a street-light bright fixture on the garage with a light sensor to turn it on and off. We disconnected that sucker within the first month here. They also mounted half a dozen spotlights along the back of the house and another half a dozen on the shed tucked among the trees. These spots are convenient when we let our black dog out for her pre-bed pee, then they get turned off. I wouldn’t think of subjecting our neighbors to the glare of white lights all night long, unlike the guy in the back who apparently has his garage light aimed directly into our bedroom. Thank goodness for summer foliage.

I’ve never researched actual statistics, but I recall reading that a lit-up house isn’t as safe from thieves as a dark property. The bad guys can see where they’re going with all the lights, rather than risking a beam of a flashlight as they pick their way thru the dark. Made sense to me.

As for my driveway - the headlights are plenty bright to show me the way from the road to the garage, and the reflectors at the end remind me where the culvert sits. No need for lights there. All in all, I like the lower electric bills from life in the dark.

19

Even worse are the people who gripe about their neighbors’ loud jangly windchimes and their perpetual noise, when they could have bought the adjacent properties and ensured quiet, and instead complain about the neighbors’ perfectly legal activities. :dubious:

20

His neighbors haven’t pointed a searchlight at his property. Your argument is a non-starter.