The benefits of solar street lights in retirement and lifestyle villages
Solar street lighting is a cost-effective, dependable and environmentally friendly lighting solution that provides several benefits that make it perfect for retirement and lifestyle villages.
What are the main benefits of solar street lights for retirement and lifestyle villages?
Solar street lights provide a range of clear environmental benefits for any community, but it is their safety and cost benefits which tend to prove the most significant for retirement and lifestyle villages.
Safety and solar street lighting
From a safety perspective, because no underground cabling is required to install solar powered street lights, hazards are significantly minimised. This is particularly crucial in retirement villages where resident mobility may be of even greater importance. Also, unlike traditional grid electrical lighting, no trenches need to be dug to install solar street lighting. This means nature strips, footpaths, roads, car park areas and other pedestrian thoroughfares needn’t be disrupted at all.
Leadsun’s solar street lights, for example, can be installed in a single day using EZYfoot concrete-less footings with EZYlift hinged lowerable poles, meaning no high-lift or heavy machinery is required around pedestrian areas. Lights can also be easily relocated if needed, and thanks to the EZY lift poles, additional lights can be added easily in future.
Another safety benefit of grid-free solar street lights lies in their inbuilt adaptive lighting controls. The solar street lighting installed by Leadsun at the Meadowvale retirement village in the Melbourne suburb of Pakenham, for example, provides a layered lighting solution featuring low-glare, adaptive lighting controls to create a safer, more inviting environment for village residents and visitors.
At Meadowvale, the solar powered street lights installed have a low-wattage asymmetrical lighting beam that controls light spill into residents’ homes. This not only reduces night-glow or light pollution, it ensures adequate and layered lighting for areas that matter most. Also, because residents didn’t want areas over-lit during periods of inactivity but still wanted the safety of more light when needed, the solar street lights are programmed, thanks to inbuilt PIR motion sensors, to operate at 30% brightness then increase to full brightness when movement is detected.
Such flexible brightness and colour-profile controls are clearly important for resident comfort, but their importance to safety is also backed by research. This includes a recent study by Plan International, Monash University and ARUP lighting focusing on women’s safety. In fact, the dark-sky compliant warm 3000K LED solar street lights Leadsun uses are those shown to create a greater sense of safety and security, as well as incorporate the lighting levels most sympathetic to humans and wildlife.
Leadsun’s cutting edge lighting technology also means smart-city–ready, low-demand IoT devices can easily be added to lights to further increase safety in retirement and lifestyle villages, including CCTV cameras, duress buttons, air-quality sensors and pedestrian and vehicle counters.
The significantly lower cost of solar street lighting
Solar powered street lights provided unrivalled cost value. Leadsun’s grid-free, sustainable lights, for example, need no mains electricity or wiring, require very little maintenance and have zero ongoing energy costs.
This was of significant financial benefit to Meadowvale, with their solar street lighting upgrade removing the major problem previously faced – the huge ongoing outage, service and repair costs of the old grid-connected street and pathway lighting. In contrast, Leadsun’s solar street lights are essentially maintenance free, only requiring periodic cleaning of optics and the solar panel. Even then, the solar panel has self-cleaning glass and is positioned at the optimum angle to get the maximum cleaning effect from rain.
Leadsun’s solar street lights also incorporate an inbuilt, web-based wireless monitoring and control called EDGE, which gives access to the lights from anywhere through secure login credentials. This allows for remote monitoring of any light’s performance, including its battery level and real-time performance. This is great for being able to quickly and easily check lights if an issue happens to ever be reported, and means light-level and brightness settings can be easily changed remotely. These benefits all again contribute to significant ongoing cost savings and safety benefits.
To learn more about how Leadsun can help you maintain the safety of your retirement or lifetsyle village while significantly reducing costs, contact us.
