05/16/2023
I had people comment on how "horrible" outdoor lighting is for pollinators and the environment. Now if I may address your concerns. It is very important to respect the ecological impact of lighting. We are careful not to over light a subject when we have that kind of leeway from a client. When using pathlights, we generally use an oversized cover so that very little light goes into the atmosphere. On house lighting, yes we use uplights as their effect is better than downlighting on the subject and our clients want that. That being said, our aim is to use the lowest power fixture that we can and we generally aim it to the homes soffit, again, hoping to minimize the effects on dark sky. In many of the neighborhoods, Belmont being one of them, this type of lighting is in high demand, and like I mentioned, we do our best to mitigate the environmental impact. I have attached a very interesting article from darksky.org specifically addressing this issues. Their study, showed that by minimized the time a light is on, had a great impact on how pollinators "moths" to be specific, had a fairly dramatic impact on their purpose. For our lights, we generally program them to come on at dusk and turn off at 11:00 or 12:00 am. This means that in the summertime when dusk is at 8:30 or so, that the lights are on for only 3.5 hours at most. so that means that there is for the most part about 6 hours of total darkness. The study shows that to be very ample. I hope that this info is a value to you. https://www.darksky.org/pollinators-switch-street-lights.../
by Callum Macgregor Postdoctoral research associate, University of York Conservation is often a conflict between the demands of development and a desire to do what is best for the environment. It’s rare that we get […]
