Saving with LED technology

Kleines Wiesental / Sittensen, June 2010. -Uniformity in all districts, consideration of safety requirements, economical use of energy – the Kleines Wiesental municipality has embarked on a path with their street lighting that fulfils these requirements. In future all street lights will be equipped with economical and environmentally friendly LED technology. 90 lamps have already been procured, of which 75% are funded from the Federal Government's Konjunkturpaket II stimulus package.

Mayor Gerd Schönbett considers uniformity and equal treatment to be of key importance in this municipality. After all, Kleines Wiesental consists of 30 districts, some of which are exceptionally small. The area of around 80 square kilometres has 3000 inhabitants. In ten districts, the streets lights have in part been switched off during the night for cost reasons. A measure that other districts were reluctant to implement despite financial constraints, because they felt the need for security for their residents to be of higher priority. This situation was a thorn in the side of the mayor.

Helecta had the solution to the problem. The company, which is based in Sittensen in Lower Saxony, offers innovative LED lamps with an E27 base, which enable simple replacement of conventional mercury lamps (HQL). As a result, street lights no longer need to be converted at great cost, or even replaced by entirely new street lights in order to benefit from state-of-the-art technology. In the Kleines Wiesental municipality, 125-watt mercury lamps are now being converted to Helecta LED retrofit lamps with 27-watt connected load. "That saves more than 70% energy, with almost identical light levels", confirms Helecta Managing Director Fabio Tinagli.

What this means, at the end of the day, was easy to calculate. The municipality in the southern Black Forest has not only cut back its environmental footprint by more than 15 tons of CO2 per year. "Thanks to LED, we are saving around 6000 Euro annually", states Mayor Schönbett. That should certainly solve the problem of lighting for night owls.