LED Street & Safety Lighting Conversion

The City of Poway has approximately 3,300 street and safety light fixtures that are operated and maintained through funding by the Lighting District. As of June 2019, Low Pressure Sodium (LPS) light fixtures were no longer being produced. Therefore, the City embarked on a project to convert all the LPS light fixtures to Light emitting diodes (LEDs), which are more energy efficient. The project has successfully been completed.

In July 2019, the City Council awarded a design-build contract to Tanko Streetlighting, Inc. to help the City select a product that not only meets the Poway Municipal Code standards for LED lighting but is field dimmable and allows for installation of light trespass shields. The goal was to select a product that will present the most savings to the City through a combination of installation costs, energy use, and long-term maintenance costs. The light selection also took into account conservation of the night sky, in that the brightness of the lights is enough to meet but not exceed the needs of the Fire and Sheriff’s Departments.
​
​ Tanko Streetlighting, Inc. completed an audit of the City’s street lighting system. The audit provided additional information for our streetlight database such as more accurate pole locations, pole height, mast arm length and distance from the street to the light pole. This information was important for completing photometrics for the lighting which was part of the design process. Photometrics show how much light will being cast by a light fixture.
​
​ With assistance from Tanko Streetlighting, GE was the manufacturer selected to provide new LED street and safety lights. Staff selected two different wattage fixtures, an 84-watt unit for arterial and collector streets and 39-watts for residential type streets. Both fixture types have 2700 Kelvin color temperature which meets the maximum allowable for residential streets and is lower than the maximum on arterial and collector streets.
​
​The new light fixtures are warrantied for 10 years however outages can still occur. You can report street light outages and issues by submitting a service request here: Service Request
​
​Conversion of the decorative lighting in the Old Poway Park and Civic Center Drive areas is currently being evaluated. The complexity of the retrofit required for those fixtures required staff to address the conversion separately from standard LPS lights. A separate project in the future will convert the City’s parks and parking lot fixtures.