Everyone knows that electricity is a non-renewable source of energy; but the fact is also that without electricity one cannot imagine life even for a second. People cannot imagine lives without electricity but they can think about various ideas about saving this precious energy source. As an individual, he or she can go green and replace our electric fixtures with something that consumes less power like the LED lighting fixtures but for electricity saving on a larger scale, we should come forwards and also contribute in replacing the normal traffic signals with the LED traffic signals.
Annual electricity Consumption in U.S
The good news is that more than 50% of the lights in the U.S. have been replaced by the energy efficient LED traffic signals, saving 33% of the energy. Approximately 3 billion KW-hours of electricity were used earlier by the traffic signals, which has reduced by around 33%. This has considerably lowered the energy consumption nationwide and trimmed the municipal budget. Most of the big cities of the U.S now have the traffic signals designed with light emitting diodes.
How are the LED traffic signals better?
LED is a small semiconductor, which emits light when current is passed through it. There is no filament kind of thing in it like the ordinary incandescent bulbs. When they are used in traffic signals, hundreds of LEDs are connected together in a cluster to achieve that high-brightness.
When the LED is used, there is no need of using the filter or lens because the traffic signal lights designed with LED only can produce the required colors of the traffic signal i.e. green, red and yellow. This results in production of true colors and there is minimal waste of heat and energy.
The best feature about traffic signal LED lights is that the energy consumption of it is only 10% of that consumed by the incandescent lamps. They also look brighter as the light is distributed evenly across the entire surface. It works great even in unfavorable weather conditions.
The number of signal outages can be reduced considerably with the LEDs because of their low energy consumption, resulting in increased safety of the traffic.
Economically, the LEDs are far better with the back-up systems. They can run easily on the batteries and can be functional even in the case of a power outage. Now we know there are so many ways in which the LED traffic signals are better than the ordinary ones.