22 January - By luck or good judgment?
I have fiddled with electrical things ever since I swapped the single power
outlet in my bedroom for a double one aged about 15 at the time. By
definition I knew everything. Dad was not entirely happy with my DIYing and
unenthusiastic about straying outside one’s area of expertise. His was repairing
Merlin engines in the middle of the Sahara and improving gas
turbines. Schoolboys - and jet engine designers - were definitely not supposed to
play around with 240 volts. Or it may have been because it was a 1940s Council house.
Strictly one socket per room, two in the kitchen.
65 years later nothing much has changed but I do like to be sure that such
jobs are done properly; to which end I subscribe to various websites which
explain the constantly changing electrical regulations.
It
was from such a source that I learned last week that Councils and the like can now buy an LED bulb which is a direct replacement for an old style Sodium Vapour lamp. It is
designed such that it suits the Sodium optimised reflector and it is not
necessary to swap over the entire lamp head as Bexley did
way back in 2016.
The change was controversial at the time and not helped by Bexley Council’s
propensity for lying. They claimed the new lighting was brighter when anyone
with a light meter or access to the specifications of new and old lamps
(18,000 lumens for Sodium, 8,800 lumens for LED) could instantly see
it wasn’t true.
According to Council sources there were so many complaints about the LED
lighting that Bexley stopped answering them and more worryingly relatively
senior staff were talking about skullduggery with the replacement contract.
As you might imagine, Bexley Tories were more than a little defensive of their LED lighting which had
gone down with many residents like the proverbial lead (sorry!) balloon and even went as far
as Tweeting that I believed them to be dim almost two years after I went against popular opinion by admitting that I’d
grown to like them.
The 2016 claim was that LED street lighting
would save £300,000 a year which no one could substantiate at the time but
with the price of electricity rising five fold since then it no longer matters. The fact that the replacement programme ran
£200,000 over budget is the same. Just
for once Bexley Council backed the right horse. The aforesaid website aimed at
electrical contractors calculates that the new lamps can save £120 of electricity per year - each! There is
a YouTube video
which provides all the details including the payback period being only eight months.
The comments say that swapping out the whole head unit can still be the cheaper option.
Three months ago Cabinet Member Peter Craske was
ridiculing Greenwich Council
for having no LED replacement programme. Too busy wrecking that borough with unnecessary bus lanes, 20 mile an hour limits
and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods presumably. It is almost enough to drag a voter back to the Tories.
But not until the party clears out the all too obvious corruption at the most senior levels.