Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: How does your community handle outdoor lighting?

[David Bygott (davidbygott]

We faced the same issue and spent about 10 years debating it, as Tucson is 
supposedly a ‘dark-sky’ area, but rattlesnakes are common too. Eventually the 
safety and visibility and legal concerns won out, and a proposal was approved 
and funded by the community, thanks to an energetic community member who worked 
out the details and made it happen. We chose a system of low-voltage (12V DC) 
path lights with metal fixtures, stems about 18” high and broad shades 8” wide 
to direct the light downwards and outwards rather than upward, LED bulbs for 
economy and durability, units spaced about 7-8 yards apart. We determined the 
spacing by experiment - putting some of the lamps on moveable stands and moving 
them around till we got it right. The connecting cables are buried only 6” deep 
and fed by a transformer fitted with a photocell for timing. We hired an 
electrician to put in some outdoor 110V AC receptacles to feed the 
transformers, and we were able to do the rest of the installation ourselves 
without specialized skills. The result was very satisfactory and we now have 
enough light to see where we are stepping at night.

David Bygott
Milagro Cohousing, Tucson AZ

——————————————————————
> Date: Wed, 5 Jun 2019 16:44:47 -0700
> From: "Dawn E. Slack" <dawneslack [at] gmail.com>
> To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
> Subject: [C-L]_ How does your community handle outdoor lighting?
> 
> Hi there!
> 
> We live in a fairly rural area without street lights.  We keep running into
> conflicts around outdoor lighting.  Some people are very sensitive to
> lights and issues around light pollution.  Others are sensitive to issues
> of visibility and safety.  I'm wondering how your community has handled
> this if you've run into this particular disagreement.  Do you have
> guidelines written into your CC&Rs?