My small (24 households), privately-owned neighborhood is seeking to replace our old, inefficient streetlamps with something newer in the hopes of reducing our electrical bill. I will soon be contacting our city official who was responsible for retrofitting nearby public streets, but that’s only for info; since we’re a privately-owned neighborhood, the arrangements and expense will all be on us.
Meanwhile, I’m curious to hear about anyone else’s experience, and any suggestions on how to get the most bang for our buck. I’d welcome product suggestions, dealing-with-installation-contractor suggestions, federal/state (MI) subsidies that might be available for installing energy-efficient hardware, and so on.
That’s a joke, you’d have to know Ann Arbor was replacing many of their streetlights to know to Google that. But there are several good links there to articles and PDFs. This page includes an estimate on the cost savings.
We had our streetlights replaced within the last year, with the “cobra” style. The light looks different, whiter and more directed. Near the bottom of the linked page, the author writes "In my first test drive on this street, I felt like I was passing through a bunch of “light columns.”, and that’s true at night, especially in the winter.
They work with designers and manufacturers to produce directed lighting which can be used outdoors and in public spaces that doesn’t waste light by having it bleed out and up, causing light pollution. In cities with Dark Sky certified lighting, you can see the stars from your backyard. Their designs tend to be more energy efficient by reflecting the light which would normally go up and out into a more focused area and thus you need less power to light the same area. They have an extensive selection of outdoor fixtures and styles they have certified as high efficiency and low light pollution fixtures.
Personally I’d love to have the opportunity to re-structure the lighting in my city so my kids can grow up knowing what the stars look like in person versus as diagrams in a book or a planetarium.
