As more Camposol streetlights go out Council technicians provide explanation

The Mazarrón Councillor for Camposol and Council technicians explain the recent streetlight failures

During recent meetings with Councillor for Camposol, Carmen Navarro, the Camposol Business Association have asked about the ongoing streetlight problem and at a meeting on April 30 the Councillor was accompanied by 2 council technicians, who explained the various reasons for many street lights on public roads in the Camposol urbanisation not working.

Most of the reasons for the outages have been described previously, including missing cable, either stolen or never installed in the first place, circuits and equipment unfinished by the original developer and circuits turned off by Iberdrola (possibly when installing replacement meters) as they were linked to lighting on private roads. All these problems are costly to remedy and will be addressed as the council proceed to take control of the completion of the urbanisation after the change of management system currently being notified to residents and homeowners.

However, a new problem has arisen, the technicians explained: over recent years Iberdrola, the electricity supply company, have been installing new meters on the public streetlighting infrastructure throughout the municipality which are controlled remotely from the Iberdrola Headquarters in Madrid. These new meters have an electrical power limit in line with EU regulations and after the meter is activated in Madrid, if the power demand exceeds the power limit it will automatically shut down the electrical power supply. Unfortunately, when the street lighting infrastructure was installed in the urbanisation the meters and regulations were different allowing more lights to be linked to each meter, but with the new meters the power requirements on some curcuits are overloading the limiters and automatically shutting down.

To remedy this new problem will require streetlighting circuits being recabled into circuits with fewer lights and more meters being added, another problem that will prove costly and will have to be approached as the council proceeds to finish the urbanisation.

Some good news is that the technicians are going to investigate a stopgap remedy involving the illumination of every alternate street light, possibly with LED to reduce the power comsumption to a level under that which would trip the limiter. The technicians added that this solution may not be possible with all lighting circuits and may have to be approved by Iberdrola.

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