4. SUMMARY

Photocontrol choices have a significant impact on operating costs. Higher quality, electronic controls tend to have higher initial prices. However, the higher initial price is offset quickly by operating savings from greater reliability. Payback is often less than one year. Each situation needs to be analyzed in the context of each utility's costs.

In evaluating life-cycle costs of photocontrols, often precise costs are not available. Few utilities have systems in place to provide activity based cost estimates or to track returned street lighting materials. Most often, this is not a problem. Figures in these analyses rarely require precise answers as you will see if you vary your assumptions. If you are really unsure of your figures, sampling may be satisfactory to get a ballpark idea of costs. In such cases, for future use, it would be helpful to establish some low-cost ways of gathering this kind of information. As can be seen from the above example, there is an excellent payback for making good decisions about street and area lighting control.

Dark To Light has developed software to support your studies of burning hours and maintenance costs. Contact us for more information.