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Streetlights Are Turning Purple
- easywood 4y agoAfter clickbait headlines, now readbait articles.
- nells 4y agoThis post is so annoyingly long. Could have written the same in 1/4 the length. Do they get paid by the word?
- bckr 4y ago"In some ways, you could represent the whole idea of modern human society with a light bulb turning on above our heads. Few technologies have been as critical to shaping the world as we know it." ... eyeroll
- Ylpertnodi 4y agoBrass band music is written in 2/4 time as [arrangers and?] copyists get paid per bar of music ;-)
- kcplate 4y agoObviously the writer was not schooled by the Rev. John Maclean… https://youtu.be/36-VQQawpsk https://youtu.be/36-VQQawpsk
- hirundo 4y agoAnother thing that is turning purple is the prose: "The mystery of the purple lights appears to be both more mundane and more worrisome than anyone has realized — a mood-indigo check-engine light on the entire infrastructure of modernity. When LED streetlights start changing color for no apparent reason, it's a visual cue that we might need to rethink, just a bit, how we build the future." Or maybe you're desperately stretching for a hook for a story about a quirk of LEDs.
- bckr 4y agoLeave them! They're beautiful!
- morelisp 4y agoI saw one on our street a few weeks ago and thought it was an intentional change as part of our building's power-reduction efforts. It's definitely better than the harsh white, but overall I still prefer the warmer colors.
- jmclnx 4y agoAre all colors changing to Purple, or is it just Red or Green. Maybe they should have done what was done years ago, install a bright white light behind a colored lense.
- nmeofthestate 4y agoDamn that took an age to get to the point. "The purple streetlights are a result of the phosphor coating delaminating from the LEDs"
- simple10 4y agoWas the post written for SEO? Maddening long for no reader benefit.
- willmadden 4y agoI wish I had skipped the meandering street light history lesson and read your comment first!
- solarkraft 4y agoSituations like this is why I prefer to read the comment first and then decide whether to read the article based on them.
- disqard 4y agoI gave up, and came here, hoping for a summary. Thank you, fellow HN'er for doing that!
- ecliptik 4y agoThe first sentence is a spin on the first sentence from Neuromancer, >The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. Rest of the article follows a similar pop-culture style which leads to a lot of unnecessary filler.
- gchokov 4y agoFinally, Synthwave everywhere!
- SanjayMehta 4y agoTLDR Manufacturing defect, Evergy will replace.
- cure 4y agoOn the plus side, the article provides an explanation for why this is happening, with some detail. On the minus side, the article seems to try to make some weird, more general point that is just scaremongering: "omg the sky is falling, sometimes components with hidden defects cause failure on a large scale years later". The author also suggests this has never happened before, which is of course false. I guess they never heard of the "capacitor plague" cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague, which was a lot more serious.
- kytazo 4y agohttps://www.bitchute.com/video/XyPAX5jark5t/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/XyPAX5jark5t/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/Xy4kWxnA3B6d/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/Xy4kWxnA3B6d/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/2LEJ7w5XoDpI/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/2LEJ7w5XoDpI/
- farkanoid 4y agotl;dw Apparently there are 5G radios installed in streetlights and graphene in our vaccines, and the graphene somehow reacts when irradiated with 5G to turn into... worms?
- Caduceus1 4y agoIf only Prince was still with us..
- cptskippy 4y agoSo I was in rural NC recently and noticed purple street lights. I inquired and was told they don't attract bugs. Could they be dumping the defective but still functional lights on markets with clever marketing?
- bsagdiyev 4y agoThey're around Raleigh, I'm up in Bryson City right now and see a few around here, as well as when I was in Florida for thanksgiving. From my understanding the power company, Duke, just got a batch that ended up having issues causing them to turn purple. I like them but I can see why people don't.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Const-me 4y ago> The blue LED, with its narrow wavelength, enabled all sorts of modern tech, from the Blu-ray disc to flat-screen monitors. I don't think the part about monitors is true. For a first few years on the market, flat-screen monitors used fluorescent lamps for backlight, specifically CCFL. Backlight made with white LEDs arrived a decade later.
- newaccount74 4y agoThat's true. Man, those CCFL backlights sucked. They grew dimmer and dimmer, and replacing the millimeter thick lamp was a nightmare. The high voltage inverter was also prone to fail. LED backlit screens are so much more reliable!
- windows2020 4y agoAlso mentioned is the color temperature many of the failed lights were intended to be: 4000K. Perhaps after spending more time in areas lit with other color temperatures, we'll become more particular about our own. What color will be chosen next time the lights are replaced? Orange, white (or purple) streetlights may appear to be a minor detail but do end up forming part of an area's identity. Their light is all we see.
- amluto 4y agoI wonder if these failed LEDs are dangerous. They presumably emit quite a lot of energy at something like 410 nm while providing comparably little apparent luminous intensity. A quick search didn’t give any clear answers.
- solardev 4y agoMy god, that's like ten pages of blogspam for a one sentence explanation.
- stmuk 4y agoChatGPT write an essay on modern street lights being purple due to a technical fault in the manner of a pretentious journalist"
- nullc 4y agoLED streetlights have been such a boondoggle. They're a major source of light polution, and their supposed reliability and cost savings is turning out to be a fiction. LPS is such a better technology for streetlighting but sadly the sudden swing to LED has made commercial production of the bulbs non-viable (esp. as LPS lamps actually are long lived, and so are replaced infrequently) and so even places that realized that the benefits of LED streetlights were largely fiction have found themselves forced onto the inferior technology.
- solarkraft 4y agoWell, why is LPS (low pressure sodium for everyone playing along at home, took me a bit of googling to find) better for street lighting and street lighting only? I like their light, but presumably if they were better they would be used, wouldn't they? Edit: There's some nice information at http://lamptech.co.uk/Documents/SO%20Introduction.htm http://lamptech.co.uk/Documents/SO%20Introduction.htm
- nullc 4y agoThey don't render colors, makes them unattractive for general lighting applications. They're exceptionally efficient and cost effective, however. Many people, myself included, find the limited color spectrum makes much better at not destroying nightvision and lack of blue light results in clearer seeing (while the blue-heavy light from LEDs is particularly bad).
- joezydeco 4y agoBest opening sentence of the year. If you know, you know.
- Schattenbaer 4y agoSome interesting material regarding degradation of LED lights here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330676601_Degradation_of_optical_materials_in_solid-state_lighting_systems https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330676601_Degradati... They note that "Chromaticity shift in the output light is one of the most common failures in LEDs [...] [Chromaticity shift] is considered as one of the most important measures of quality and is often studied and reported" (page 6) so it sounds like this could hardly be new info to the manufacturer.