Found out my neighborhood's streetlights waste 30% power during off-peak hours

I was reading my city's energy audit online last Tuesday and saw that our streetlights run at full brightness all night even when nobody's around. Turns out they could save enough juice to power 50 homes a year just by dimming them from midnight to 5 AM. Has anyone else looked into local lighting waste and what did you find?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_john1mo ago

We actually had the same problem in my neighborhood back in 2019. The lights on Maple Street were running at full blast all night, so I called our city's energy office just like @nina_jenkins suggested. They had a guy come out and check the system, and it turned out half of ours were the older kind that couldn't dim. Took about three months, but they swapped out 12 of them for the new dimmable ones. Since then they cut them down to 40% brightness between 1 AM and 5 AM, and I noticed our street's electric bill for the block dropped by almost 20 bucks a month. Worth making that call to see what your town can do.

nina_jenkins1mo ago

Streetlights run at full brightness all night" sounds like a quick call to your city's energy office could fix that.

garcia.laura1mo ago

Actually, I read somewhere that those lights are dimmable in a lot of newer systems now. A buddy of mine works in city maintenance and he says they can adjust them remotely from a computer. It's not always a quick fix though. Some of the older fixtures just don't have that capability built in, so they'd have to replace the whole lamp. But yeah, definitely worth checking if your town has the newer kind.