Cities are swapping traditional light bulbs for more energy-efficient brighter LEDs. The rise of these blue LEDs are creating problems for our night sky and our health.
Article explains solution – we’re accustomed to buying light bulbs based on watt usage, but in reality, with LED’s, the power savings are good enough compared to earlier technologies you should focus more on lumen output and the type of light output you’re getting.
Chelan installed lights that were around 30% brighter than what they had before and skewed notably more blue, and they didn’t feel the need to look closely at what they were buying or what the impacts on the local population of cranking the street lights up would be because the only thing they looked at were the incredible! power!! savings!!! The increase in light pollution was because they didn’t think about any factors other than wattage. What more light, or what more blue light would do, didn’t come up. Wattage is fine for a lot of applications, but obviously a city or a national park has a few things to keep in mind re: public lighting.
I think a lot of it is also that we never bothered to use the switch to LED streetlights to fix the design issues with streetlights as a whole. So many of them are designed with no real care in their directionality. They are there to light downwards but make no efforts to minimise any directed up. A lot could be done to mitigate the effects with a better design focus to limit the lighting only to where required.
Article explains solution – we’re accustomed to buying light bulbs based on watt usage, but in reality, with LED’s, the power savings are good enough compared to earlier technologies you should focus more on lumen output and the type of light output you’re getting.
Chelan installed lights that were around 30% brighter than what they had before and skewed notably more blue, and they didn’t feel the need to look closely at what they were buying or what the impacts on the local population of cranking the street lights up would be because the only thing they looked at were the incredible! power!! savings!!! The increase in light pollution was because they didn’t think about any factors other than wattage. What more light, or what more blue light would do, didn’t come up. Wattage is fine for a lot of applications, but obviously a city or a national park has a few things to keep in mind re: public lighting.
I think a lot of it is also that we never bothered to use the switch to LED streetlights to fix the design issues with streetlights as a whole. So many of them are designed with no real care in their directionality. They are there to light downwards but make no efforts to minimise any directed up. A lot could be done to mitigate the effects with a better design focus to limit the lighting only to where required.