Sunderland council re-used their photocells too. As you say replacing working lights with LED ones is a waste of money.

Especially when working installations are replaced at great expense to the taxpayer also get replaced only after a few years... at great expense to the taxpayer!

The amount of working street lights and sign lights I've seen removed over the years... such a waste. They will never get the money back in energy savings. Just like the single concrete column and SON lantern near my house replaced with 3 new column and 3 new LED street lights! The old one was absolutely fine and the column was in great condition.

These are starting to appear in durham. Not sure what they are but possibly Thorn Isaro Pros

Many saving schemes presented to councils for LED conversion don't even rely on the electricity savings, but on the EU (directly or through the UN) giving actual cash for the fact of installation of LEDs. So it's not even only your taxpayer money at work, but also of taxpayers in the EU that get absolutely nothing out of it in their country. The EU fucks this way even with cities in countries which are not part of the EU. (I have seen this happen in Israel, using the UN as a proxy)

Yes they are @Danny.

Thorn in all but name tbh.

Although LED, I don’t think Thorns street lighting division is all bought in Chinese shit though???, could be wrong?

its still led. yep it happened here on a grand scale aswell all cpo-t / cpo-tt lamps ripped out for led before all the sox. so now they have a substantial amount of sox left and probably running low on lamps. btw the energy savings cosmo versus led are small and cosmo is a nicer light in my opinion. cool white led have a blue tint to them

just to mention i have 3 poss 4 urbis sapphires 60w cpo and an urbis 90w cpo lantern - evolo 2 all salvaged recently from a car scrapyard and working. some had manu dates of 2013 and had been lying at least 3 years

Doing the same in Surrey atm too.... We had the entire county re-lit in 2014 using a mix of WRTL 'Libra' 55w PL-L lanterns on side roads and WRTL 'Arc' 150w SON lanterns on main roads. The council has now found a spare £20M to rip all of this out and replace with LED to 'save money'. This from a council that cannot afford to unblock drains or repair the roads. The Libras have been retro-fitted with LED trays (dim as fuck) with 8 little LED's on them. they're now replacing the main road lighting with these tiny little LED lanterns that manage to produce a significant amount of glare, whilst failing to really light anything up at all (not sure how that's possible). The lanterns in use on the main roads look like they'd be better suited on 5m columns in side streets. It's total crap!