What's In Your Light Fittings?


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Been looking on t'internet for unbiased comparisons of sodium/LED street lighting, but can't seem to find much. Seems to be mostly LED makers/sellers singing LED's praises. The wikipedia entry seems to be the only one to list the dis-advantages of LED street lights..

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Basfordlad, yeah I thought they'd probably update the IEE regs to suit modern tech, most of the reasons for pull switches stemmed from the size of UK bathrooms, wasn't enough room to swing a cat...LOL

More than recoup the costs in energy and replacement. BUT, my primary reason is less energy, I'll be on battery soon. No idea what a lamp costs in the UK, but stateside they have dropped dramatically

Bulwell Cemetery ? Those LED lights will be gone next week. This is Bulwell, no respect for the living, never mind the dead.

How can wood be carbon neutral, me finks these loonys must be breathing too much smoke, whacky baccy smoke....LOL

Someone needs to educate those loonys, coal starts out as wood, so using their logic coal is carbon neutral too.

Coal has taken millions of years to form yet can be burned in a few hours and never replaced. That's why it's not 'carbon neutral'. Burning wood is different. Firstly, young growing trees consume more carbon dioxide and generate more oxygen than mature ones, so plantations are actually beneficial for air quality. Secondly, it will only take a few years to grow new trees instead of it taking millions of years to replace coal. The carbon released when you burn wood can be locked back into growing trees straight away so is carbon neutral. Carbon released when burning coal will never be recaptured in new coal so is not neutral.
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Surely DJB, coal is currently being formed as we post here.

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At such a slow rate that it can't possibly be replaced. That's the difference. We can grow trees as fast as we burn them, but it would take milions of years for that wood to turn into coal. When we burn coal, we release the carbon trapped in wood over millions of years. When we burn wood, we only release the carbon trapped over a few years. It's estimated that, at current rates of use, there are 147 years worth of coal reserves in the ground which holds millions of years worth of trapped carbon. That is why coal is not 'carbon neutral' whereas wood is.

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Best wood for heating/furnaces is hard wood, my fire wood comes from oaks and black walnut, for a tree to be viable firewood takes 40 to 50 years.

Wood chips are waste from the timber industry, saw mills, furniture making, building industry, (floorboards, studs, rafters etc..

Now most wood products waste is recycled into OSB, wafer boards, Medium and high density fibre boards. Technically, there is no wastage from industrial wood plants anymore. So making wood pellets and chips for power stations is a total waste of resources.

Industrial tree farming for wood products is wasteful of agricultural land and is devoid of many species of birds and animals, it's not an eco friendly environment.

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There are problems with almost every form of power generation (if not all). I simply explained how wood is carbon neutral, not that it was the answer to all the world's problems. Even 40 years to grow a walnut compares favourably with millions of years to create coal. Also, while you are quite right that plantations don't provide much in the way of habitat, growing trees do lock carbon in and create oxygen so it does at least help the environment in one way which burning coal doesn't.

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One of the problems with wood chip/pellets is the storage.

Whilst they are in store a process called auto-oxidation can take place which produces large amounts of carbon monoxide. There have been nine fatalities over recent years where people have entered the storage area/bin, in one instance an engineer open the sealed door and died where he stood, his mate who was stood behind him survived and managed to call the emergency services.

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  • 3 weeks later...

They're changing the streetlights on my road over to LED's. I've still got the orange low pressure sodium light outside my house at the moment, but expect it will be changed over soon. I'll miss the orange glow when it's gone, I'll have to get used to the pure white of the LED. Hope it doesn't light the bedroom up too much, I quite like the soft orange glow through the curtains...

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  • 1 year later...

Coming home from Leicester t'other night in the fog, I noticed that the orange low pressure sodium lights on the M1 near East Mids Airport cut through the fog much better than the LED's on other roads did. The white LED lights just seemed to reflect of the fog particles where as the sodium lights went straight though. Just my two pennies worth...

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