Streetlights have no meters. The electricity is billed off an inventory: every lamp declared by wattage and burning hours, audited annually, to the unit. Ours bills for one thousand four hundred and thirteen. We own one thousand four hundred and twelve.
I am a street lighting engineer for a district council. Twenty two years, and the inventory is mine.
How you pay for a streetlight, since almost nobody knows.
There is no meter. You hold an inventory of every unmetered asset: lamp columns, illuminated signs, bollards, traffic signals. Each entry has a wattage, a control method and a location, and the supplier calculates consumption from the declared load multiplied by the burning hours for the latitude.
That inventory is submitted annually and audited. An error in it is money in one direction or the other and the audit is not gentle, and I have been through four of them.
Ours was one thousand four hundred and twelve columns in 2003 when it was digitised, and it has moved with every new estate and every removal, and every change has a works order behind it.
The bill has been calculated on one thousand four hundred and thirteen since 2003.
One column. About forty eight pounds a year at the old sodium rate and about nine pounds now that we have gone to LED, which is the number I want on the record because it explains why nobody senior has ever cared.
The extra entry has a reference number, a wattage, a control method and a location.
The reference is in the right format for our numbering, which runs by road and then by sequence.
The wattage is seventy watts, which was our standard residential lamp until 2007.
The control method is photocell.
The location is Lamp 7, Pinfold Lane.
Pinfold Lane has six columns.
I have counted them standing in the road with a clipboard. Six. Numbered one to six on the plates, which are riveted aluminium plates with the column number stamped on them, and I have photographed all six plates.
There is no seventh column. The lane is four hundred metres long and it ends at a gate onto the water meadow and the last column is at the gate, and it is number six, and beyond the gate there is nothing but grass and the river.
What I have done about it.
Reported it to finance as an inventory error in 2004, the first year I held the job, and asked for the entry to be removed.
It was removed. I have the email.
It was back on the following year's submission, and on every one since, and there is no works order creating it and no amendment in the log.
I have raised it with the supplier twice. Both times they asked for a copy of our inventory, which is the correct response, and both times our inventory as submitted contained the entry.
That is the loop I have not been able to get out of. I maintain the inventory in a database and I export the submission from the database, and the database has one thousand four hundred and thirteen records in it, and the record for Lamp 7, Pinfold Lane has a created date of the ninth of October 2003 and a created-by field with my own staff number in it.
I did not create it. I know that because on the ninth of October 2003 I was in hospital having my appendix out, and the dates are in my personnel file, and I went and looked.
What happened when I counted the whole district.
In 2015 the LED replacement programme gave me a reason to physically inspect every asset, which nobody had done since digitisation, and I did it over eight months with a van and an apprentice.
One thousand four hundred and twelve columns on the ground.
Every one matched to a record. Every record matched to a column.
Except that one.
I did it again in 2021 with a contractor and a survey app with a photograph and a satellite position against each asset, because a programme that size is funded on a verified inventory.
One thousand four hundred and twelve photographs. The app would not let the contractor close the survey with an unvisited asset, and the contractor's project manager rang me about it, and I told him to mark it not found, and he did, and his report lists one asset not found.
What the supplier's data says, which I pulled last year for a different reason.
The LED programme means every column now has a node on it that reports back, and I have consumption data per asset, which we never had with sodium.
One thousand four hundred and thirteen nodes report.
I sat and read that number for a long time. A node is a physical thing that sits on top of a lamp and talks over a network, and somebody in my team has to climb up and fit it.
The one on Lamp 7, Pinfold Lane reports a burn of about four thousand hours a year, which is right for a photocell at this latitude, and a consumption consistent with a twenty watt LED, which is what we replace a seventy watt sodium with.
So somebody fitted a node to a column I have counted the absence of twice.
What I do about it.
It stays on the inventory. I have stopped trying to remove it, and if I am honest the reason is that the two times it has been removed it has come back with my staff number on the entry, and I would rather it sat there quietly than have a third record with my name on it in the audit trail.
Nine pounds a year. I have personally approved invoices for one hundred and forty thousand pounds of LED conversion and nobody has ever asked me about Pinfold Lane.
What I do not do any more is drive down it at dusk.
The photocell data gives a switch on time for every node and they switch within a minute or two of each other across the district, which is what photocells do.
Lamp 7 switches on eleven minutes after the rest of Pinfold Lane, every night, which would mean it is in shade, and the only thing on that lane that casts a shadow at dusk is the hedge on the far side, and the far side of the hedge is the meadow.