Brexit and lighting??

[AngryHorse]

I`ve just spent 10 minutes reading all sorts of silly posts on LG, with folk saying, "now we can take down all those silly LED lanterns, and get some proper lights back up"!!
I have to agree with Medved on this though, I really don`t think there will be much of a change to the lighting industry, if any?

What do you guys reckon will come from all this?

[HIDLamp]

I doubt there'll be any change if any what with all this green motion globally hence the presence of L.E.D street lighting in other countries such as the USA and Brazil. Also the councils already have their L.E.D lanterns either installed or ready to be installed so they'll probably stay. As for the long term there might be more chances of change back to older technologies but I doubt that will happen.

[FrontSideBus]

Nothing much will happen to be honest.
We'll be exempt from any future lamp or ballast bans but since we have no manufacturing capability ourselves we're stuck with whatever the Europen manufacturers sell unless we import from the US ect.

[AngryHorse]

Be interesting to see 94 lm/W, 8 foot tubes, (F100/840s), make a come back, but like you say, all our best lighting factorys are gone now.

[Slyspark]

Doubt anything much will change. We don't make anything any more and large companies are going to produce what the majority will want rather than small runs for the likes of us. I suspect going forward we'll probably fairly closely follow what Europe does anyway in regards to 'energy saving'. It might mean we don't have to follow future bans for various lighting products, but at supplies of lamps run out as the countries making them cease production, they'll still end up going anyway.

[Kev]

Nothing much will change although I have seen a few posts saying we can use traditional lighting and that we will no longer have the appliance ban which was heading our way!

[James]

Don't forget (if you ever knew the real truth) that it was the UK who lobbied among the hardest for lighting regulations that forced through the GLS ban, and the UK who voted for the mercury and T12 bans (of course you will never see such admissions in the UK press, who like to pin all responsibility on Brussels and ignore the fact that Britain voted for it).

On top of this, in recent months it is the UK who is lobbying to ban all light sources and luminaires <120lm/W by 2020, and all mercury-containing light sources by 2018! I have to say I am frequently ashamed to be British when my job requires me to sit in the EU Commission as one of the Industry representatives during the Lighting Regulation debates, and see the UK people spewing out all their poorly thought-out rubbish. The only thing they seem to understand is the lm/W figure and no comprehension whatsoever about lighting quality, reliability etc. At the last Consultation Forum they ridiculed the EU position to aim for a modest 80lm/W system efficacy by 2020 (which would preserve FL and HID systems), and insisted on minimum 120lm/W - citing the example that if you can buy a 120lm/W LED filament lamp in Asda today, then why can't the lighting industry offer that for all professional applications! Meanwhile the other big countries have such smart people, who have clearly taken the time to learn about things like glare levels, colour quality, premature electronic failures, the waste stream generated by disposal of perfectly good traditional luminaires that are often more efficient and reliable than LED - but the UK people just don't get it. LED and lm/W is all they seem to care about.

So when the UK does eventually free itself of Brussels, you should not expect government policy to reflect the view on sites like this. Instead, get ready for tougher lighting regulations, faster phase-outs, accelerated degrading of the quality of lighting installations, and even faster scrappage of the high quality traditional products. And don't believe for a minute that these politicians have the slightest interest in listening to reasonable arguments like anyone on this site could make. So as far as Lighting and indeed most technical matters are concerned, I am far happier to be governed by the astonishingly well-educated and intelligent European politicians than the British lunatics!

NB I am not saying that Brexit is not a good thing, in many ways the EU needed a damn good wake-up call. But the topic of this thread is the impact on lighting, and for this topic only I do have to say that if I was still living in Britain I would be a lot more scared to be governed by the incompetent showmen I see turning up in Brussels, than to follow the policies of the comparatively intelligent and well-informed politicians I see from many other countries!

[Kev]

On the other hand James the unelected MEPs that made these poor rediculas decisions for the UK in the EU are now out of a job!

[RobTDCI]

The lm/W argument reminds me a bit of the MPG for diesel cars. That's all a lot of people see and think they will save money with a diesel car when they only ever do short stop start journeys around town for shopping and ferrying the kids around. Diesel cars are quite unsuitable for that kind of driving and will cost them more for various reasons.