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Town to test LED lights
Wednesday August 20 2008
CYNTHIA GAMBLE, Staff Writer
 
The Town will test the effectiveness of LED street lights on the multi-use path that will be built on 10 Sideroad from Eighth Line to Mountainview Rd.
The asphalt path will be similar to the one on Eighth Line (Main St.) from Maple Ave. to just south of Gellert Community Centre.
A1-Asphalt Maintenance Ltd. will construct the path with the lighting for $623,636. Twenty-two LED Relume pathway lights will be purchased for $30,000 from Lumecon-Inforesight Consumer Products Inc.
The LED light trial is putting the pathway lighting over-budget so Halton Hills Hydro will be kicking in $5,000 to help pay for the extra cost.
While LED lights have an initial higher cost to install, they have the potential to reduce the Town’s average $250,000 street lighting energy bill.
The Town will split the pathway into three different test sections, with separate metered power sources to test the LED (Light Emitting Diode) in the field.
The lighting on Eighth Line to 10 Sideroad will be a combination of conventional and LED lighting and will test the compatibility of the two systems. As well, this test will determine whether it’s practical to replace the traditional lighting with LED.
The second test stretch will be on 10 Sideroad, from Eighth Line to east of 16 Mile Creek. This will be LED alone.
The third remaining section, to Mountainview Rd. will be traditional path lights. These sections will be metered separately to compare light levels, electrical consumption and lifecycle costs, under similar field conditions.
Gord Troughton, the Town’s manager of Design and Construction, said it will be known relatively quickly what energy consumption savings there are, but it will take longer to establish the long-term life cycle/maintenance costs.
“The use of LED technology in street lighting is still very much in its infancy but it does show great potential,” said Troughton. “Potent-ial benefits include reduced energy consumption which leads to reduced emissions from generation of that electricity. Potential savings are of interest to Halton Hills Hydro who are participating with us in this project, and there’s also a group called the Clean Air Partnership, which is interested in tracking LED trials.”
Similar trials with the same LED lights, and already seeing some success, are located in Welland, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Las Vegas.
By the time the Town is ready to build its next multi-use path in a few years, Troughton said this pilot project would have established what direction the Town should go— stay with the conventional path lights or use LEDs.