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Old Posted Feb 27, 2017, 12:54 AM
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Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Thunder Bay
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Quote:
Originally Posted by niwell View Post
When I was in Northern Ontario for work a bunch in summer / fall of 2015 I noticed that most towns had completely switched over to LED. Like, 100% - not just in some areas or as part of life cycle upgrading. I would imagine there were some infrastructure grants involved and some sort of cost-benefit analysis to show that it was worth it to do so.
Thunder Bay is somewhere around 75% converted and we only started the process two years ago. We're in a situation where we have little choice, the cost of hydro is killing us.

The city still hasn't found a decent LED fixture for arterial roads, but they've got some samples set up around the city. My street was converted to LED last fall, the first artery in the city to have them.

The downside of the LED lights we use is that the smaller residential ones don't have diffusion lenses, you can see the actual LEDs with the naked eye, so when you do get a look at one while driving, it's quite bright compared to the black sky, relative to the old sodium arc lamps which were only a little bit less bright, but the light was diffused around them and there wasn't a solid black background almost touching the light. People here have said the LEDs are like looking at an eclipse.
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