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05/03/2017 09:30 AMWith action by the Board of Selectmen (BOS) last week, the town now will move forward with the project to convert the town’s 1,080 streetlights from sodium-vapor and older generation LED bulbs to modern LED bulbs. The move to efficient LED bulbs will cut the town’s energy use and eliminate the annual streetlight maintenance fee the town paid to Eversource.
Last week’s BOS vote authorized First Selectman Carl Fortuna, Jr., to enter into a contract with low-bidder Siemens for the services to convert the Town’s 1,080 streetlight system to an all-LED bulb system. The work will begin with an audit to map and verify the location of each of the town’s streetlights. The Siemens bid was $258,000 to complete the conversion project.
Three other bids the town received ranged in price from the next lowest at $278,000 to the high bid of $298,000.
Woody Weiss, an electrical engineer from Madison, working as a volunteer, has advised Fortuna in helping to develop the bid request and evaluate the bids received for the LED project. Weiss brings experience as a key volunteer guideing the town of Madison’s LED streetlight conversion project, now underway. He attended last week’s Old Saybrook Board of Selectmen’s meeting to speak about the town’s project and the bids Old Saybrook had received.
Although Siemens was the low bidder, Weiss noted that it is not only the firm’s low price that recommends the firm’s selection.
For this streetlight conversion project, “It is Siemens start to finish—their warranty, their people, their engineers. It really is a strong selling point for smaller towns like us,” said Weiss.
Weiss said that the other bidders were national firms, but their proposals indicated that they would contract with local subcontractors to do the bulb conversion.
To help explain LED (light-emitting diode) bulbs ratings, he introduced a discussion of lumens and Kelvins. He said a bulb’s output is described by its lumen rating. Second, the color hues that each streetlight casts—whether it is of warmer yellower hues or of brighter blue-white hues—is described by its Kelvin rating.
For the LED streetlights installed in residential areas, the town plans to install LED bulbs set at 2200 lumens; these residential-area bulbs, should it be needed, will be of a type whose lumens can be adjusted to output up to 2700 lumens. Brighter streetlight bulbs rated for higher output, appropriate for locations needing more light, would be installed as fixed-output bulbs rated at 4000 lumens.
“Eversource bills [towns] on the full potential output of each LED [street]light,” said Weiss, explaining why it wasn’t wise for towns to buy brighter bulbs with higher lumen ratings with the adjustable output feature.
All of the LED streetlight bulbs the town will purchase, according to Weiss, will be rated at 3,000 Kelvin. This measure indicates of hue of the light coming from each bulb. From the Westinghouse website comes this explanation: “Kelvin describes the color temperature of a bulb and it is measured in degrees of Kelvin on a scale from 1,000-10,000: warm white [is] from 2,000- to 3,000 K[elvin] and cool white [is] 3,100- to 4,500 K[elvin].”
Speaking to the other selectmen about Weiss’s guidance and assistance, Fortuna said, “These insights have been really helpful. I feel very luck and the Town of Old Saybrook is lucky to have your help.”
A March 6 Town Meeting voted to authorize up to $585,000 to fund both the town purchase of the streetlights from Eversource, to buy the LED bulbs, and to pay for a vendor’s services to audit the streetlight system and replace the existing bulbs with new LED bulbs. Eversource set the purchase price for the town to buy its streetlights at $214,700.
Fortuna last week said that reaching the terms and signing a final agreement with Eversource for the streetlight purchase will likely take several months. Once ownership has been transferred, the streetlight conversion process can begin. Based on the current timeline, field work to exchange the light bulbs could begin in late summer.