Inside eBay's cheapest LED "street light" - with schematic

This little LED street light is so cute that I had to buy one. It does make me wonder if they actually use things like this in China, as street lights in rural areas, or just as yard lights.

It's probably the most basic thing you could mount onto a pole outside and call a street light. But I'm not convinced that it's truly water resilient, and the complete lack of an earth/ground connection is unfortunately standard for this style of light.

There's a commonly spouted piece of misinformation that "electricity takes the path of least resistance", and that is WRONG! Electricity takes ALL paths of resistance, and while the most current will flow in the path of least resistance, enough can flow through other resistance paths to kill you.

Simply assuming a metal pole stuck in the ground is an acceptable "grounding" is not correct. In the event of a fault, the pole can become live, and while some current will flow to ground it may not be enough to trip a breaker. That would mean the pole was still live and touching it could result in you becoming another current path with fatal results.

A rather horrible example of that in the UK is a council worker who was fatally electrocuted while working on a street light where he or someone else had used ground as the neutral due to the proper neutral connection being damaged underground. That is VERY taboo, as a broken ground connection then makes all the associated metalwork on that section live with respect to ambient ground.

This is where I'll have my obligatory rant about the one day G39 slideshow that is often used in the UK to facilitate the use of lower wage labour to do work in one of the most dangerous electrical working environments possible. (lots of exposed metalwork and wet ground). It's a very unpleasant example of the Dunning Kruger effect, where an individual will be over confident in doing electrical work because they have been given an "electrical qualification".

I'd rather all workers in that industry got a deeper education so they understood the hazards of what they were working with. Especially when things are not "normal".

If you choose to use one of these lights, be aware that it DOES need an earth/ground connection added to avoid associated metalwork becoming live in the event of leakage to ground.



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