"New LED street lights fail in the rain"

Sometimes it's better to be a late adopter of a new technology. That way, you let all the other folks work through the bugs before you spend your money on it.

But the leaders of San Antonio seem to love to adopt anything "green" just as soon as they possibly can, even before all the problems have been discovered. And sometimes this produces head-shaking results.

Earlier this year we told you the City of San Antonio and CPS Energy are spending more than $14 million of your money to replace street lights with energy saving LED fixtures.  Now the News 4 WOAI Trouble Shooters have uncovered that all 25,000 of the fixtures had to be sent back to the manufacturer because of a glaring defect.

Close to 2,000 of the street lights are already up in a few areas around the city, but installations came to a halt a few weeks ago when some of the new fixtures began to fail. 

...

In September CPS Energy noticed something similar happening: some of the new lights going dark shortly after installation.  And the cause?  Rain… getting into the fixtures and shorting them out.

(from WOAI-TV)

Seems they've also had problems with bird droppings covering up the sensors that are supposed to tell the lights to shut off in the daytime. In the end, these LED lights will probably work out to be a good product, but I bet you didn't know that you, as a San Antonio taxpayer, were helping to pay for the beta testing.

And you don't even get to play with it.