Green Light

I'm back after a three day lay-off courtesy of BT. Broadband across our town was out of action from Thursday to Saturday and, although most ISPs were telling their customers that it was due to a fault at the exchange, BT were telling their customers that there were no faults and trouble shooting customer PCs and arranging for their network team to visit homes. It doesn't take a genius to work out where the blame lies then. Anyway, I have blips in the bag and will get round to back-blipping them in due course.

Mrs W will happily tell you that I get a bit sad at this time of year. By that I mean the geeky, pathetic type of sad as I have an unnatural interest in overhead centenary supporting Christmas lights and indeed the lights themselves. The source of this obsession is the fact that I have the leading role in putting up the lights in the market square of our small town in Bedfordshire. Indeed I blipped my call to arms on 18th October and we had a really good group of volunteers who gave up their valuable time to assist us over three Sunday mornings and, although we have always taken four weeks to get them all done, we have managed it in three this year and that is in part because we have gone green.

In previous years, we spend a lot of time installing incandescent bulbs into the bulb holders as the lights are being hooked up because otherwise they get broken and many did in any case. It made it a very slow process and needed additional helpers; for each person up a ladder hooking the cables up, there was a person at ground level ensuring the ladder was steady and another fitting the bulbs into the holders. Very often, although all the bulbs were tested before use, they failed due to the movement or just because they are so delicate.

Last year we replaced some of the old light strings with new cable and LED bulbs and this year, due to the success, we replaced the rest. The thing is although the LEDs do not create the wash of light that the incandescent bulbs did, they give a really vibrant colour and are therefore much more effective in the dark. More to the point, the globe of the LED bulbs are plastic and quite resilient so we can just leave them on the cable strings and that cuts down the time considerably.

Last but not least, I have just done a calculation that I think is really impressive. The replaced lights had a total of 525 bulbs, each burning up 25 watts of electricity per hour and the new ones for the same lengths of cable have 634 LEDs. However, use a mere 1.2 watts per hour so instead of the 13 Kw load of the old incandescent bulbs, the town only uses about 760 watts per hour for a more impressive effect. Added to the fact that we spend almost nothing to put them up as it is done entirely by volunteers and checked over by an electrician, unlike neighbouring towns who spend thousands upon thousands just to get them up, this is quite impressive and as chief putter upper, I am rather proud of what we achieve.

So today's blip shows one of our LEDs hooked up to the 4mm steel straining cable using a carabina clip on a 25 metre span across the Market Square. Roll on the big lighting up event on Friday evening - I suspect you haven't seen the last of the lights.

Backblipped
Thursday 24th November - Pampered
Friday 25th November - Creating Christmas
Saturday 26th November - Dig Deep