This Pierce County city spent $457,600 on LED streetlight bulbs. Almost all quit working
Most of a batch of over 700 LED streetlight bulbs the city of Gig Harbor installed quit working.
Mayor Tracie Markley told residents about this problem in her Sept. 29, 2023 Gig-A-Byte newsletter.
“Prior to 2017, the city was spending a significant amount of time and expense replacing the existing metal halide lamps in the decorative, green streetlights,” she said. “In 2017, the city took on an aggressive project to replace all existing streetlight lamps with energy efficient and long-life LED lamps.”
The idea was to replace the metal halide lamps with LED lamps “to reduce energy consumption and reduce maintenance costs due to the extended life of the bulbs,” the city’s public works director, Jeff Langhlem told the Gateway Friday, Jan. 19.
At the Jan. 8 City Council special meeting, Langhlem told the council in his department update that the removal of these faulty LED lamps continues.
They replaced 715 of the metal halide lamps in the decorative green streetlights with LED lamps from a vendor called Daylight Technology USA, Langhelm told the Gateway. These streetlights are located randomly throughout the city, he said.
The Gateway contacted Daylight Technology USA on Tuesday, Jan. 23. Renwei Lee, a representative of the company, told the Gateway the LED lamps purchased by Gig Harbor had “defective drives,” a component of the bulbs.
Lee further explained they’ve discovered the drives only have a “working time” of five years.
Each of them cost $640, Langhelm said. The total price to replace all 715 metal halide lamps with LED lamps was $457,600.
When asked why the lamps are so expensive, Langhelm said the LED lamps have a high intensity and they are customized to fit each streetlight.
These LED lamps have a high intensity of “up to 55,000 lumens, compared to a household lamp of about 1,800 lumens,” Langhelm said.
“A lumen is a measure of the amount of brightness of a lightbulb — the higher the number of lumens, the brighter the lightbulb,” according to the Department of Energy.
‘Involving the city attorney’s office’
The LED lamps that were purchased from Daylight Technology USA had a ten year warranty for each lamp, and they each had a life expectancy of twenty years, Langhelm said.
Just four years later, the new LED lamps in city’s green streetlights began to stop working in 2021. The city is still working to get them fixed.
When asked how many of them have stopped working, Langhlem told the Gateway he did not have the exact number, but that “most of them” have malfunctioned.
“Operations staff continue to remove failed streetlight lamps and ship them back to the vendor for warranty repairs at an alarming rate,” Langhelm’s Jan. 8 report said.
The vendor is repairing and replacing the LED lamps for free since they are still within the warranty period, but the city’s operations staff is having to remove the lamps from the streetlights and ship them back to the vendor’s facility on the east coast.
The city is also having to cover shipping costs.
The city ships about 40 LED lamps back to the vendor at a time. Daylight Technology USA has been fixing and sending the lamps back three to five weeks later, Langhelm said.
When asked if they are considering legal action against the vendor, Langhelm said: “We are involving the city attorney’s office in the discussion with the vendor.”
Langhelm added that the city operates more than 800 additional LED lamps from a different vendor and that all of them are working as expected.
The 800 other lights were installed at random dates prior to 2017, as well as in new city streetlights that were installed after 2017, Langhelm said.
This story was originally published January 23, 2024 at 12:26 PM.
