LED Lights and Garage Door Opener???

Just one thought: why did not they design traffic lights with RGB LEDs ? They should be much cheaper with a single lamp. However we are all so used to 3 lamp traffic lights...

Yup. At the end of Feb we had a nor'easter here, with 2 feet of very wet snow and 50-mph winds. It broke a great many trees from the snow load, and left the branches and the wires looking like cat tails--coated with a cylindrical blanket of snow, about the same thickness all round. I'd have noticed the traffic lights except that all the power was out. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

We lost power for 3 days. My in house emergency led lighting is very nice. i'm still working with it. I aquired a new portable TV also. My led lights stay on all the time is select locations, but they also add to the house lighting effects, like under cabinets, etc.

greg

Wow did this thread take an interesting direction. I will say that it has provided some very interesting reading. Not only about my problem but CFL's and LED's and potential banning of Incandescents.

After reading some of the responses to my problem, I suspected one LED bulb in particular. I have it lighting the interior of my garage but tied to the same low voltage landscape system. This one in particular was a 10 Watt LED bulb (not 10 watt equivilant, but an actual 10 watt bulb). It is extremely bright which is what I wanted, but suspect there is no filtering. I did recall something quirky when I first plugged it in, but I blew it off at the time.

Fortunately, it was the easiest one to disconnect and test the RF issues with the remote. So far, the Opener Remotes are working normal, but we are monitoring them to see if this really is the problem.

Great conversation... glad I inspired "fodder for thought". Later, Jerome

--------------------------------------- Posted through

For people that can't distinguish colors it's certainly better.. since they seem to be standardized in most places in North America with red at the top and green at the bottom.

Of course some of the outlying settlements, such as Britain and Quebec, have their own quaint customs:

I'm old enough to remember driving in NYC with the two-color lights (red and green on simultaneously rather than amber), which always struck me as being more efficient.

they had snow on them in Ocala this winter.

They didn't. The LED lamps are retrofitted. They did the red first, in my area.

The occasional extreme high is one thing, but the year round average is higher in Florida. Unless you're claiming that the laws of physics don't apply in your hell hole.

Hmm... I wonder why red? Spends the most time on? If one color is going to fail, presumably people will just stop anyway, so why not make it the red one that'll fail anyway?

First, red LEDs are the cheapest, and easiest to drive, so they were the first to come out. Also, the red filter means a lot of heat insde for the old incandescents.

Next came green. which was a little harder to drive, and didn't last as long initially. After those problems were solved, they were in use.

The yellows came last, mainly because the yellow incandescent is on with so little duty cycle that they last forever anyway!

Charlie

Unfortunately not. The opposite is usually the case. People tend to plough into each other at junctions when the red light has failed.

I expect red (and yellow for roadworerks please don't hit me signs) were the first to adopt because high intensity pure colour LEDs in those colours were available first at a decent price. It is only comparatively recently that true green high intensity LEDs that would pass muster for a green traffic light have become available at an affordable price.

Regards, Martin Brown

Ah, thnks -- there's clearly a bit more to this that I thought.

My guess was that they were replacing more red lamps, and started the conversion to LED as they failed.

It's not unusual at all. When I lived in Vermont it wasn't unusual at all to see snow stuck to the LED traffic lights. It wasn't often bad enough to totally obscure the lights, but it could easily become so.

That may work with dry snow. It's not going to do anything with a driving wet snow.

The ones I liked, also in NY, were standard three-color lights but the yellow lit during the final part of the green cycle, warning that the light was about to change to yellow. It seems they replaced that with a delay after red, before green the opposite direction.

Red lights were often higher power and burned out faster. LEDs made more sense, initially, for the red (and were cheaper).

Thanks everyone for the comments and suggestions. This problem did get resolved and the Ultra Bright LED's that I was using in my front yard were causing RF signal's to block the Garage Door Opener Remote from working properly. I swapped them to the back yard and used some other LED bulbs. Funny though... These were purchased via eBay but came from a US Distributor and not overseas, so these were the LAST ones that I suspected as causing the problem. Thanks again, Jerome

--------------------------------------- Posted through

yellow

about

red,

Thanks for this bit of minutia. It explains some of the dumber design decisions i have seen in traffic signal timing.

And i think that the yellow overlap is a really good idea. Though not as good as all red intervals.

going to=20

red one=20

It was more a technology choice, not only are they on the most they were the easiest, and least expensive to start with, back 20+ years ago. In many places they were financed by giving an investor a piece of the energy savings for years to pay for the modules and installation.