It has been a long and drawn out process, but you think that you have finally found a way to make sure that the street light in front of your house serves its purpose. Not only has the street light only worked intermittently the last four or five years, but it is now also completely engulfed by a tree. And while the tree is not a problem in the late fall and winter months after all of the leaves are gone, when the tree’s canopy is full, both the light and the street sign are completed covered. In the winter when the leaves are not the problem, the street light still rarely works. Several neighbors have reported the problem on the local utility company’s website, but nothing has ever been fixed.

This afternoon, however, you were finally able to talk to someone on the phone. It required waiting online for most of an hour, but the representative who talked to you was more than helpful. In fact, she said that she had reported both the light outage and the tree trimming problems and assured you that someone would be out within the next couple of days to deal with problems.

Residential, Commercial, and Outside Lighting All Serve Important Purposes

Although there are times when many of us want to leave the lights of the city and get outside of town to see the stars, the fact of the matter is the majority of the time we rely on the street lights in our neighborhoods, the lighting fixtures in our homes, and the high powered LED lighting fixtures at work. When you are the last one in the office or when you are out for a later than normal walk with your dog in the neighborhood the right lighting keeps you feeling safe. From the lumen maintenance that is required on some of the newest fixtures in a house to the solar parking lot light fixtures in the newest structures, lighting is something that we might all take for granted. When the streetlight by our house, however, goes dark it is a problem that can make you feel anxious, and at times afraid.

Nikola Tesla first demonstrated induction lighting in the late 1890s, and the lumen maintenance that is required today is very different from the first Tesla demonstration, but few can imagine what our lives today would be without lights. In fact, outdoor lighting is so important in public spaces that in many areas the law requires parking garage lighting to be on 24 hours a day.

Some lighting problems are simple enough that they simply require routine lumen maintenance and changing a bulb, while other outages require residents to wait on hold for an hour, but all of these problems need to be fixed to make certain that everyone is as safe as possible.