195 Compact Smart Poles for 4.9 km
A 195-unit SOLARTODO rollout at 25 m spacing maps to about 4.9 km of dense San Salvador streets, or roughly 40 poles per kilometer. The engineering fit is a 6 m, Ø315 mm cylindrical pole, not a 12 m highway mast. That matters for sidewalks, civic corridors, retail frontage, and transit-adjacent blocks where equipment width, visual clutter, and cabinet count affect installation acceptance.
San Salvador Department has about 1.56 million residents, while the capital district has more than 330,000. With El Salvador electricity access above 99%, the practical architecture is grid-backed smart lighting with local solar and battery buffering, rather than a fully off-grid lighting-only system.
Pole Architecture and Electrical Loads
The recommended configuration uses a constant-diameter Ø315 mm steel cylinder with 5 mm wall thickness, hot-dip galvanizing, and black RAL9005 powder coating. Modules are integrated flush into the pole body: no side arms, external charger bollards, separate camera posts, widened bases, or independent WiFi cabinets.
| Subsystem | Engineering specification | Procurement implication |
|---|---|---|
| Pole body | 6 m, Ø315 mm, 5 mm steel wall | Compact sidewalk footprint |
| Streetlight | 80 W, 12,000 lm, 4000 K | Pedestrian-scale visibility with lower load than 150 W legacy fixtures |
| Solar wrap | 173 W 360-degree CIGS thin-film | Auxiliary power for controls, sensing, and resilience |
| Battery | 2,400 Wh LFP | Short-outage buffering for controller, camera, SOS, WiFi, and lighting |
| EV interface | 7 kW, Type 1 and Type 2 outlets, 5 m coiled Type 2 cable | Curbside top-up without a separate charger cabinet |
| User power | USB-C PD 30 W plus USB-A | Low-power public device charging |
The 173 W CIGS wrap should be treated as an auxiliary generation layer. It can support sensors, communications, emergency electronics, and uptime, but municipal planners should still preserve grid backup for predictable lighting and EV charging.
Smart Functions and Acceptance Checks
Each pole consolidates lighting, solar harvesting, LFP storage, camera coverage, environmental sensing, WiFi and 5G readiness, SOS interface, USB charging, display capability, and EV charging into one curbside asset. That consolidation reduces the number of separate foundations, enclosures, cable routes, and maintenance touchpoints.
For acceptance, procurement teams should test luminaire safety, grounding, ingress protection, control telemetry, and interoperability. IEC 60598 is relevant to luminaire safety checks, while GB/T 37024 can guide smart-lighting interoperability review. The important distinction is operational: lighting and communications need stable uptime first; EV charging is a useful secondary load that must not compromise the core municipal functions.
For the full configuration reference, see solartodo.com/solutions/san-salvador-smart-streetlight-195-unit-6m-cylindrical-pole
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