Facts About LED Tube Lighting

Detroit, whose 139 square miles contain 60 percent fewer residents than in 1950, will try to nudge them into a smaller living space by eliminating nearly half its streetlights.

As it is, 40 percent of the 88,000 streetlights are broken and the city, whose finances are to be overseen by an appointed board, can’t afford to fix them. Mayor Dave Bing’s plan would create an authority to borrow $160 million to upgrade and reduce the number of streetlights to 46,000. Maintenance would be contracted out, saving the city $10 million a year.

Other U.S. cities have gone partially dark to save money, among them Colorado Springs; Santa Rosa, California; and Rockford, Illinois. Detroit’s plan goes further: It would leave sparsely populated swaths unlit in a community of 713,000 that covers more area than Boston, Buffalo and San Francisco combined. Vacant property and parks account for 37 square miles (96 square kilometers), according to city planners.

“You have to identify those neighborhoods where you want to concentrate your population,” said Chris Brown, Detroit’s chief operating officer. “We’re not going to light distressed areas like we light other areas.”

Detroit’s dwindling income and property-tax revenue have required residents to endure unreliable buses and strained police services throughout the city. Because streetlights are basic to urban life, deciding what areas to illuminate will reshape the city, said Kirk Cheyfitz, co-founder of a project called Detroit143 -- named for the 139 square miles of land, plus water -- that publicizes neighborhood issues.

“It touches kids going to school in the dark,” said Cheyfitz, chief executive of Story Worldwide Ltd., a New York marketing company. “It touches midnight Mass at a church. It touches businesses that want to stay open past 9 p.m.”

Bing in 2010 began an independent project called Detroit Works to sort ideas on how to reconfigure the city for residences, businesses, green space and even agriculture, a plan due in August.

Meantime, Brown said, the city will fix broken streetlights in certain places even as it discontinues such services as street and sidewalk repairs in “distressed” areas -- those with a high degree of blight and little or no commercial activity.

Bing’s plan requires state legislation to create the lighting authority. Governor Rick Snyder supports the plan, said his senior policy adviser, Valerie Brader.

There’s already experience snuffing out streetlights within Detroit’s borders. Highland Park, a 3-square-mile city encircled by its larger neighbor, removed 1,100 of 1,600 streetlights last year, after piling up a $4 million debt to DTE Energy. The move saves $45,000 a month, said Alejandro Bodipo-Memba, a spokesman for the company.

Only major streets and intersections remain lit in the city of 12,000, once home to Chrysler Group LLC’s namesake car manufacturer and Henry Ford’s first moving assembly line. Mayor DeAndre Windom, 45, said residents at first complained, through few do now. He’s considering grants and private funding to relight darkened streets

Colorado Springs pulled the plug on 9,000 of its 25,600 lights in 2010 to save $1.3 million, said David Krauth, a city traffic engineer. Some were relit as revenue improved, though 3,500 remain dark, saving about $500,000 a year, he said.

In Detroit, some streets have no working lights. Many appear dim or are blocked by trees. And some areas with mostly vacant lots are well-lit.

New Lenox is considering a switch to LED streetlights, a move that could save the village energy and money.

Trustee Ray Tuminello brought up the option at the most recent Village Board meeting, and everyone appeared to be on board.

With this change, the village could see a savings of $129,000 every year in electric costs alone. More savings would be realized because less maintenance would be needed.

Currently, the village is responsible for 1,221 light heads. The average wattage estimated for those heads is 235 and the annual cost for each is about $138.

A change to LED lights would bring the average wattage per head to 85 watts and a cost of $32. The LED heads last 3.5 times longer than the village's current bulbs, Tuminello said, significantly reducing maintenance.

The village would change over 200 heads a month for six months, costing a total of $672,000. But $237,000 would come from a state program, leavin the village to pay about $435,000.

If the village financed this project over 48 months, Tuminello said New Lenox would pay about $10,000 monthly over that span. But the new lights would provide monthly savings of $10,750.

"As soon as these things are on, you're instantly saving money," Tuminello said. "It's not about the first 48 months. it's about when all these are paid off, the savings might be $150,000 a year."

Tuminello said that with these lights, there are other benefits the village could take advantage of. For an extra fee, for example, the village could upgrade to use "smart poles," which would allow officials to lower the wattage even further in some areas. He added that the lights could look just as they do now, instead of the "bright blue lights you think of with LED."

"For example, at the Metra lot we could say we want to lower the wattage and save even more money," he said. "It would be to the point where the lights would still appear at full strength, but we'd be saving more. We could even do this on certain roads or areas that don't need wasted electricity."

Tuminello said the village will now work with ComEd to catalog every light head's energy usage and specific wattage. After that, the village could test the lights in a certain area for no cost before moving forward with the project throughout the village.

The prevalence of acute and chronic pain sufferers in the United States is simply astounding. The Arthritis Foundation has reported that over 50 million Americans, or one in five, suffer with arthritis with 42 percent of adults in the U.S. experience pain daily.

The American Pain Society reported on the 2005 National Health Interview Survey findings that in a 3 month period over 1/3 of the entire U.S. population experiences pain. Of those reporting pain, 31,066,000 experience migraines, 28,401,000 had lower back pain, and 9,535,000 complained of jaw pain. This is just a small sampling of the countless number of pain related conditions that are out there. There are many other afflictions that cause chronic pain such as tennis elbow, shoulder pain, joint pain, knee injuries, and the list goes on and on.

LED light therapy offers a drug-free way to relieve pain and speed up the healing process. The healing benefits of this technology were discovered by NASA when red LED light therapy was used in plant growth experiments and was found to speed up the healing of injuries in outer space. In fact a device using LED (light emitting diodes) is being used in clinical trials and shows great promise as a treatment in healing bone marrow transplant patients and has been found to offer relief for cancer patients as well.

The Deep Penetrating Light (DPL) System uses a combination of red and infrared LED lights to penetrate and permeate deep into skin, tissue, muscle, joints, and even bones where the wavelengths stimulate healing and reparative processes. The combination of red and infrared LED lights has been shown to ease pain and accelerate the healing process by:

1. Increasing circulation by boosting the formation of capillaries which deliver more oxygen throughout the body speeding up healing.

2. Blocking pain transmitting chemicals resulting in a natural and drug-free form of analgesia (pain killer.)

3. Triggering the production of endorphins which helps to facilitate long term pain relief.

4. Relieving swelling by increasing lymphatic system activity.

5. Stimulating the release of Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) which is a major carrier of energy to the cells.

6. Replacing damaged cells more quickly by increasing RNA and DNA synthesis.

Both red and infrared LED lights have been shown to affect at least 24 different positive changes at a cellular level. This powerful treatment penetrates into the body easing pain, reducing inflammation, repairing damaged tissue mending injuries, and helping with infection. With millions of people suffering with daily pain, red light therapy offers a natural, gentle, and safe alternative for easing the agony.

SecureLite also incorporates PowerSecure's breakthrough dusk-to-dawn controls to maximize efficiency and reliability, industry-leading surge protection technology which surpasses industry standards, and "tool less" entry for easy maintenance.

Sidney Hinton, CEO of PowerSecure, said, "We are thrilled to announce these new LED lighting awards. Both our EfficientLights walk-in cooler lights for retailers, and our SecureLite Area Light for utilities are relatively recent product introductions which are seeing nice early traction in the marketplace. 2012 continues to be a year in which retailers and utilities are moving from 'testing' to 'adoption' of our new lighting applications -- driven by the compelling economic model and quality of light our products deliver."

THOMPSON: For 30 years, corporations dominated the efficiency game via off-shoring and automating. Now consumers are getting in the game by replacing old products with cheap tech or by sharing goods. What changed?

GROSS: Several things changed, and I definitely trace it back to the onset of the Great Recession. If your top line isn't growing, and your net worth is tumbling, and your ability to borrow against your home equity disappears, you have to start figuring out how to do more with less. So the movement toward consumer efficiency was spurred by necessity. The old personal finance advice - stop buying that latte at Starbuck's and start making coffee at home - actually makes a lot of sense. But the nice thing is that new businesses arose to appeal to the new zeitgeist - Netflix allowing for the rental of movies instead of the purchase, Zipcar, Rent-the-Runway, or Chegg, which allows students to rent textbooks online. All of these let people get the same utility without having to go into debt to purchase and take ownership of things.

But standards also make a very big difference. The typical car sold today is significantly more fuel efficient than the typical car sold five years ago. And I'm not just talking about luxury goods like the Prius. I'm talking about entry-level vehicles like the Chevy Cruze. Yes, automakers have responded to persistently high gas prices by working on fuel efficiency. But the higher mileage standards promulgated by the Obama administration lit a fire under the carmakers. In the same way, standards for more efficient light bulbs and appliances wind up helping consumers reduce their operating costs, and boost their operating income. Imagine how much better off (and efficient) the typical American homeowner would be if building codes mandated greater use of more effective insulation.

THOMPSON: Do you think the new consumer efficiency revolution could stem from income inequality -- that our wages are falling behind productivity, so we're using technology to make our money go further?

GROSS: There's something to your point. I'd put Groupon and LivingSocial in the bucket of efficient consumer businesses, and there's no question they've caught on because people need to make their dollars go much further. But of course we've always used technology to make our money go further, regardless of where we are in the economic cycle and what's happening with income inequality. I'm old enough to remember what long-distance phone calls used to cost before MCI came on the scene. Now I use Skype, not because my income has gone down, but because it's cool to get stuff for free and I like being able to see the person at the other end of the call. And in many ways, I think it actually think that it works the other way around.

To a large degree, efficient consumption starts as a luxury good and then trickles down to the rest of consumers. There are a few reasons for that. At the beginning, efficient consumption products - the Prius, solar panels, programmable thermostats, LEDs - are niche products and so have a hard time competing on price with mass-manufactured equivalents that have been around for decades. They're artisanal by comparison. Now think about housing. It's more efficient - and ultimately reduces your operating costs - if you can live close to a train or light-rail station, so you don't have to own a car to get around. But we all know that homes and developments close to transit tend to be more expensive than those that are farther away. In Connecticut and New Jersey, real estate in towns that have direct train connections to New York, tends to cost significantly more than houses in nearby towns that don't have them.

The last couple of years have been so warm that many, myself included, have been experimenting with setting transplants into the garden earlier than June 1. I only do it with a proportion of each variety, so if things get frigid and I lose the early transplants I will have enough to replace the deceased. No matter when I set things into the greenhouse or garden, I always take the time to harden them off first.

The reason to harden off is that it improves your transplant survival rate significantly. Even if your seedlings don’t die, if they get too shell-shocked by sudden exposure to constant cold, wind and direct sunlight, they can become stunted in size and have a reduced yield.

The time to harden off is a week to 10 days before you intend to set plants out into the greenhouse or garden. I know some gardeners who feel that flowers and vegetables being raised in a greenhouse do not need to be hardened off, but I disagree. While a greenhouse protects seedlings from wind and cold air, the switch to all that sunlight and the rigors of transplanting still is hard on them.

The process for hardening off is simple: You gradually expose the transplants to increasing amounts of the outdoor environment. For seedlings going into the greenhouse, I follow the same schedule as for those going into the ground except I use clear plastic umbrellas that shield them from the wind and cold air. There is no point in exposing them to the harsher conditions if I am going to put them back in the sheltered environment of the greenhouse ― they only need to become accustomed to increased sunlight and the greenhouse-like heat-magnifying effects of the plastic.

The first day the plants all go into a protected area of light or dappled shade, remaining outside for three or four hours before being brought back indoors. Honestly, I don’t know if I could manage this trundling back and forth, especially on workdays, if I didn’t have four of those garden wagons and three wheelbarrows that I can load up once and then simply wheel them in and out of my mudroom or garage.

Each succeeding day, I leave them out longer and in more exposed locations. The first day of hardening off, they are right by the back door, where the wind is largely blocked and it is shaded for most of the day. By the end, they are outside overnight and are sitting right next to the area where they will soon be living.

It is important to check watering needs daily because exposure to wind and sun dries the soil out faster. Additionally, your plants are growing larger root systems by the day, so even if you were not hardening off, you’d find that the plants would have increasing needs for water.