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Street Lights turning Purple

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rgarito:
All over America (at least), there are numerous reports of street lights turning purple.

The issue is caused by some sort of "manufacturing defect" of the LED bulbs that many cities have used to replace their old lamps.

Here's an example:
https://www.fox13news.com/news/failing-street-lights-in-tampa-emit-bright-purple-hue

A simple Google search reveals 1000's of hits.

Sounds like some LED manufacturer(s) gonna be replacing a lot of LEDs!!!   :palm:

Whales:
Almost all commercial white LEDs are blue LEDs with phosphors ontop.  These street lights sound like they're losing their phosphor layers.

Temperature x hours too much for them?  Or maybe something more creative like the phosphors flaking off due to moisture and cycling?

sleemanj:
I think I recently saw somebody look at this sort of failure where the phosphor detached... maybe it was BigClive.

Edit: ahh it was the lg tv thread below I was thinking of

floobydust:
It's been attributed to phosphor failure. I thought it's the same problem affecting LCD TV backlights https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/why-do-backlight-leds-burn-out-and-go-blue/

The debacle of Detroit's streetlight failures- over 20,000 "prematurely dimming and burning out" cost almost $7M to replace them. They failed melting the lens.
Detroit Sues Lighting Manufacturer Over Failed Street Lights The City sued Leotek Electronics, got only $4M in settlement.

Point is it's very expensive labour-wise to swap out defective streetlights, about 1,500 a week were done and the City of Detroit contracted out all streetlight work, they didn't have their own crews.

james_s:
My friend who works in the streetlighting industry was just talking about this the other day when I was hanging out with him. He said it is a particular brand and model of luminaire that is having this problem, he's been working on getting me a defective one to do a failure analysis on.

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