Retrofits – Ivins Night Sky

Ivins & Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine Take the Lead in Improving Nighttime Health & Safety

The Ivins City Council took groundbreaking action this evening on what we believe to be the lead nationally in dramatically improving nighttime health and safety for Ivins residents with changes to its outdoor lighting ordinance.

The Ivins City Council gets an overview of the recommendations for changes to the city’s Outdoor Lighting Ordinance from Mike Scott with the Ivins Night Sky Initiative.

The city now requires that the maximum color temperature for all new outdoor non-residential lighting is 3,000 degrees Kelvin, down from 4,000. But more importantly, these new lights will be required to add amber filters the city designed that effectively reduces the color temperature to about 2,200 degrees Kelvin, eliminating almost all the blue light emitted by LEDs that creates safety and health problems. Outdoor lighting for new residential development will be limited to no more than 2,700 degrees Kelvin.

Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine (RVUCOM) is going even further.

The city’s new requirements only affect new construction, but RVUCOM has begun a study sponsored by the Ivins Night Sky Initiative to see if these new requirements can be effectively retrofitted into existing lighting while continuing to meet the university’s need to provide nighttime safety for their students. The study will also look for a solution to another problem magnified by LEDs: unwanted glare.

Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine’s Ivins campus.

The City has long required outdoor lighting to be fully shielded, meaning light fixtures can’t aim light up into the sky. But even fully shielded fixtures send light out horizontally as well as down. That not only wastes light by sending it where it isn’t needed, it creates a glare problem.

RVUCOM’s study will help others determine the feasibility of retrofitting their own lighting to reduce blue light and glare. It will also help the city in its efforts to get designated as a Dark Sky Community by the International Dark Sky Association.

What’s the big deal?

LED lighting is quickly replacing High Pressure Sodium lights and other older technologies because LEDs are so much more energy efficient. You can easily spot the difference. The older technologies produce a softer, warmer, more comfortable light compared to the bright white light from LEDs. That’s because LEDs emit a lot of blue light while the older technologies emit very little, if any blue light.

Blue light rays have short wavelengths just above ultraviolet light. We’ve known for a long time that ultraviolet light can be harmful. It can burn. That’s why we wear sunscreen. We’re learning that too much blue light can also be harmful.

The blue part of the light spectrum is responsible for creating most of the glare we see. Glare constricts your pupils, diminishing your eyes’ ability to adapt to low-light conditions, like nighttime.
Scientists are just beginning to understand the negative impacts on health, including blue light’s contribution to cardiovascular disease, sleep, metabolic and immunological disorders, obesity, cancer, macular degeneration, glaucoma, and more.
And blue light is disruptive to plants, animals, crop pollination, and on and on.

How does the Ivins solution work?

Ivins City has found a way to use LED technology but take out most of the blue light. That eliminates the added health and safety risks from LEDs compared to older technologies and results in a warmer, more pleasing light.

Wilson Jimenez, the Ivins City employee who came up with the filter, finishes installing the prototype anti-glare shield on a light fixture for Rocky Vista University along with the three anti-blue spectrum filters.

Alan Koharcheck and Tim Povlick, members of the Ivins Night Sky Initiative, in the City’s shop with Wilson Jimenez making a final check of the prototype before unveiling it to the University.

Ivins Mayor Chris Hart shows the finished prototype to *Kristine Jenkins* , Rocky Vista University’s Director of Campus Operations and Terry Meyer, Manager of Public Safety and Security.

Tim Povlick, a member of the Ivins Night Sky Initiative’s Technical Committee, tests the finished prottype anti-glare shield.

For more information about the progress of this study, blue light health and safety issues, or other information about outdoor lighting, contact us or visit their website at IvinsNightSky.org. The Ivins Night Sky Initiative is a 100% volunteer, not for profit, 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, citizen organization. Also visit the International Dark Sky Association’s website at www.darksky.org. For more information regarding Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine please visit the website at http://www.rvu.edu/.

Add your comments

Please post your comments using the form at the bottom of this article. We would like to get your views about this article and about our Initiative.

Join us

Let us know if this Initiative is important to you, if you are willing to get involved, and what else you think we should be doing to improve, preserve, and protect the night skies in Ivins.

Just because we have submitted recommendations for changes to the city’s Outdoor Lighting Ordinance doesn’t mean we’re done. Far from it. Seriously, far from it! We can really use your talent and energy to make our Initiative’s vision and goals a reality.

Email us and we will get back to you right away.

A simple fix to sleep better

Reading an interesting book at bedtime is a time honored method of falling asleep. With the advent of LED reading lights a problem has cropped up due to the blue light content of LED’s, which reduces the feeling of sleepiness. This is a relatively new problem, because the old-fashioned incandescent bulbs we grew up with emit much less blue light.

The white light you see from your LED light is actually a combination of blue, green, and red light. When you buy an LED, look for the “color temperature” or CCT on the package. These graphs show the light spectrum from three LEDs with color temperatures ranging from 2700K to 4000K. The lower the color temperature, the “warmer” the light and the less blue it emits. Buy LEDs with the lowest color temperature you can find. Even then, there’s still a lot of blue light compared to old technologies like incandescent bulbs.

Recent research shows the blue light that is prevalent in LEDs disrupts the sleep cycle. Blue light leads to a reduction in the production of melatonin, an important hormone for restful sleep. For more information about LEDs and blue light, see our video article, The hidden danger of white light: Blue.

Reading before going to sleep is restful but the LED light I’m using is disruptive. So what can I do? Glad you asked. A couple of members of our Ivins Night Sky Initiative have a solution. Tim Povlick and Lois Diehl added a simple filter to their reading lights, cutting out almost all of the blue light. More about the filter later.

Tim and Lois providing education about lighting at our information booth during the Kayenta Street Painting Festival

In this example the LED based reading light had a CCT of approximately 4000K. The device uses 3 AAA batteries and the light resembles a miniature Cobra street light. Here’s what the light looks like before adding the filter and after.

Note: Don’t wrap the filter over lights that get hot

This image shows the lamp illuminating a text book. Note the white color of the light indicating a large percentage of blue light.

To reduce the blue light a blue blocking filter was used. The material is soft plastic and has an orange color. The filter is cut to size using scissors and taped to the LED.

Light from the reading lamp now has a soft warm cast and does not interfere with easily falling asleep. This image shows the effects of the filter.

Reading is more relaxing and the slight color cast doesn’t interfere with reading the text. Oh, and if you don’t like the color cast shown in the example above, just try different filter colors. The ones to test range from a light yellow to an amber. Lighter colors mean you will get more blue light, but any reduction in blue is an improvement.

What do I get and where to buy it?

You can get the filters from Adorama (Lee filters UV Blue Blocker). A 24′ x 24″ gel sheet costs $8.69 and is big enough to cover a few lights.

The City is doing it too

The City is doing the same thing on new streetlights. Here’s how the color spectrum changes with the addition of an amber filter. The blue light almost disappears.

Join us

Let us know if this Initiative is important to you, if you are willing to get involved, and what else you think we should be doing to improve, preserve, and protect the night skies in Ivins. We will get back to you as soon as possible.

Taking the bite out of a cobra

An Ivins resident contacted us in February asking for help solving a light trespass problem he has that is caused by a City cobra streetlight like the one shown here. The light is on all night and is located right outside his bedroom window.

We contacted the City and suggested additional shielding to stop the light trespass onto the resident’s property, like what the Santa Clara Harmons did on some of its parking lot lights that were affecting neighboring homes. Here’s a photo of one of the shielded lights.

Alternately, we suggested removing the light completely or turning it off. It is located mid-block, not at an intersection, and the Ivins streetlighting ordinance does not require mid-block streetlights unless there is a crosswalk. There is no crosswalk, and none planned. The utility company charges the City for removals, so there’s a budget issue.

The City’s Public Works Director agreed that the City’s mid-block streetlights are unnecessary and developed a plan to remove them. He did not like the idea of turning off the streetlight because then people call the city to let him know a light is burned out.

Also, we did our own research and were told by Dave Imlay, the Director of Hurricane Power, that he believes a city does not have liability concerns if there is no light but does have liability concerns if there is a light, but it is not working. That left shielding or removal as the only options.

At the beginning of June, the City had the cobra streetlight removed, solving the resident’s light trespass problem and reducing (admittedly minimally) the lumen output of the city.

The cobra streetlight next to Gordon’s house was taken down in June.

Summer isn’t stopping the Technical Committee

Our Technical Committee isn’t letting summer get in the way of having fun in shop working on projects. Last month the Committee started working on ideas for incorporating shielding and filters in existing lighting fixtures.

In the past couple of weeks they have started to turn their ideas into reality, buying a contemporary outdoor lighting fixture to dissect and test their ideas.

Technical Committee members transform their ideas from paper to reality and started testing a variety of shielding options this week on an actual outdoor lighting fixture on Tuesday.

Wilson Jimenez set up a portable light pole yesterday for testing the Technical Committee’s work. Here City staff help Wilson with position the pole, now mounted with the lighting fixture and the first filter test.

Testing shield angles
A mock-up shield and filter
Technical Committee in the shop
Tim measuring illuminance from mock-up shield and filter design

A simple solution to uplighting

Jack, an Ivins resident attended a presentation by the Ivins Night Sky Initiative at Red Mountain Resort in April and was energized by what he learned about the problems created by unnecessary light pollution.

Artificial light at night not only impairs our view of the night sky, it adversely affects our environment, our safety, energy consumption, and our health.

So, Jack went home and modified his outdoor sconces on his house.

The wall sconces on the outside of his house, like so many others, aimed light both up and down. When he built the home there wasn’t an uplighting restriction for this type of lighting.

They did not shine light out horizontally, so they did not affect the neighbors, but the uplighting created unnecessary skyglow.

Jack’s simple solution was to put a Dixie cup inside the sconce on top of the light source, blocking the uplighting completely. Problem solved. So now there’s an alternate story to explain why this area is called “Dixie.”

But wait, there’s more. Now all the light was directed down with none of it wasted. Plus, the white interior of the Dixie cup made the downlighting even brighter… too bright.

So, Jack replaced the 40-watt equivalent LEDs with 25-watt equivalent LEDs in all his sconces. That reduced his lumen output by almost 40%. Granted, these sconces don’t consume a lot of energy. This change saves Jack about $30 to $40 a year. It’s not a lot, but every bit helps.

If you have you made changes to your own outdoor lighting to make it more “night sky friendly” we would like to know about it. Send us your story.

Eagle Rock solved a glare problem

The Eagle Rock Homeowners Association in Ivins was approached by Marc Deshowitz, one of it’s board members at the time, to initiate a light reduction pilot program for 30 days for 20 of it’s 92 homes.

The lights that were being used in overhead garage lights were transitioning from 60 watt incandescent flood lamps to CFL floodlamps. This issue with both bulbs is that they protruded from the light fixture creating a lot of glare.

The new lighting proposed utilized a CFL or LED Bulb which would be recessed into the lighting fixture, eliminating side glare.

After 30 days, the Board and community unanimously approved the new lighting and a team of residents replaced everyone’s bulbs in the HOA. 92 homes plus the clubhouse resulted in a retrofit of 195 lighting fixtures making this HOA much more night sky friendly.

If you have you made changes to your own outdoor lighting to make it more “night sky friendly” we would like to know about it. Send us your story.

Simple outdoor retrofit examples

This is one of seven excerpts from a presentation by Marc Deshowitz, Preserving one of our most precious resources… the night sky. This video shows how simple and inexpensive it can be to retrofit existing outdoor lights to shield them and reduce, if not eliminate glare. And it shows the dramatic result of a city’s major retrofit.

We will post another video excerpt from Marc’s presentation soon. Here are the titles of the seven video excerpts:

Are we losing our heritage of dark skies?
The hidden danger in white light: Blue
More light doesn’t mean more safe
How light pollution increases air pollution
Wrong outdoor lighting harms nature and crops
Simple outdoor retrofit examples
What you can do to improve outdoor lighting

Let us know if this Initiative is important to you, if you are willing to get involved, and what else you think we should be doing to improve, preserve, and protect dark skies in Ivins. We will get back to you as soon as possible.