Blue Light Special

[patric]

If you or a neighbor have a Mercury Vapor light, you might want to know that it's days are numbered.

...about 1095 days, give-or-take a few months (or even years).

The bluish-green light that has become ubiquitous as a "barn light" and marketed to skittish urbanites as a "security light" is meeting it's end on the congressional chopping block.

The "Energy Policy Act of 2005" outlaws the manufacture or importation of Mercury Vapor ballasts as of January 1, 2008.    

http://www6.lexisnexis.com/publisher/EndUser?Action=UserDisplayFullDocument&orgId=1619&topicId=100013172&docId=l:315849925&start=1

The main arguments have not been so much that Mercury vapor fixtures have traditionally been the poorly-designed third-world glare-bombs we grew up seeing as streetlights, but that more recent lighting technologies like Sodium Vapor and Compact Fluorescent produce much more light with much less energy.  Sadly though, utilities still prefer those brighter lights inside the same-old glare-prone NEMA "security lights".  

PSO stopped installing Mercury lights around 1993, and eventually converted Tulsa's streetlights to the goldish-looking Sodium (with the average life of a streetlight fixture being about 15 years, they were due anyway).
http://www.eere.energy.gov/femp/technologies/eep_hid_lumen.cfm    

At present, PSO still maintains the older bluish lights, but will probably convert them to the much brighter Sodium sometime after the law takes effect (Of course, the customer always has the option of ditching the PSO glare-bomb in favor of something more neighbor-friendly).      



Streetlight replacement in Arlington
http://www.town.arlington.ma.us/Public_Documents/ArlingtonMA_DPW/archives/S003663E4