Flood lighting refers to the light that usually installed on buildings or poles, providing directional lighting for various types of space. This kind of light is usually used to offer illumination to outdoor areas for safety, pedestrian and vehicle use, space with sports activities or other large regions requiring ordinary exterior lighting. Please kindly check some image examples of commercial and industrial flood lighting fixtures that you may be familiar with.
There are some inherent characteristics in all HID lights. They can give rise to issues for those managing outdoor lighting for a facility or organization.
Common wattages of HID industrial and commercial flood lighting fixtures range from 100w to 1000w. The higher light output needs the higher wattages. A 400 watts or 1000 watts HID lamp (very common wattage for outdoor flood lights) costs up to $210 and $526 per lamp per year in electricity cost alone.
Maintenance costs are usually a great focus for exterior lighting, such as wall pack lighting fixtures. Besides the concerns of lamp lifetime, outdoor flood lights usually need to make the use of a lift or bucket truck to replace a ballast or a lamp as they are usually installed on the building walls over 15ft. Most of buildings and facilities do not have bucket trucks or lifts, so an external contractor has to be hired to maintain these fixtures. These expenses will accumulate in a few years. For instance, it may require up to $1,200 in manpower and materials to maintain one flood lighting fixture in three years.
According to the kind of HID Lamps your building or facility uses, it can vary evidently in the performance characteristics of you outdoor flood light fixtures. For instance, you can see the light that is "Whiter" when you use the Metal Halide lamp. However, these kinds of lights tend to accelerate lumen degradation, which means that the light output of the lights decreases rapidly after initial mounting, causing a decrease in the overall lifetime of the lamps (We've all seen those “pink” flood lights, which are hard to offer any lighting on the ground).You can see the longer “useful” lifetime when you use High Pressure Sodium, because the lumen degradation of this type of lamp is less than metal halides’. However, it is with a very low Color Rendering Index (CRI) as its fuel structure provides a really “Orange” light. By and large, you trade your longer lifetime for poorer quality light from a visual point of view.
It would be significant to know the great advantages of exterior led flood lightings due to the way they GENERATE and DISTRIBUTE light. Different with HID lamps that generate light via the consumption of a “fuel source” , Light Emitting Diodes (LED) do it through semi-conductor. With regard to " distributing " light, LED lighting fixtures usually use “Multi-Point” sources, which implies that LED lighting fixtures have multiple diodes and separate optical elements. If you compare the distributing light of HID lighting fixtures (there is a bulb and reflectors in the lamp), the consequence is that the light of LED is more equably “distributed’ on a surface.
Normally, the wattages of wall pack led lighting fixtures range from 40w to 600w, which usually leads to 40% to 60% energy consumption reduction. This is the consequence of how light is produced (see above). It means that your facility can save up to $300 for one light each year in electricity bills.
Likewise, because of the way of LED’s generating light, it is quite different in the way that it progresses through its functional life. Despite the significant reduction in fuel source, LED (Light-Emitting Diode) fixtures degrade their light output really slowly over time rather than Stop working properly at once. Consequently, the lifetime of LED fixtures (usually more than 100,000 hours) can be evidently longer than that of HID fixtures. This in turn greatly cuts down the bill of maintaining flood lights over a longer lifetime.
Moving on to how the LED lighting fixtures “Distribute” light: It is reason of multi point design that Outdoor flood led lighting fixtures usually offer a quite uniform distribution of light pattern. It means that, when the distance of the fixture or pole varies, there is less change in the light level across a given surface. HID lamps usually generate a "Bright Spot" under the lamps. With the increase of distance from the pole, the brightness decreases sharply. This problem can be alleviated by uniform distribution of LEDs. As comparing to HID, the foot candle from LED conversion are more evenly distributed. Besides the uniform distribution of light, LEDs can be used at a range of color temperatures, thus offering a range of options to raise the visual perception of “BRIGHTNESS.”
The first is to communicate with manufacturers' neutral suppliers of LED lighting solutions provider. Why is this method opposite of the company youmight have used in the past few years? Unless that company focuses on offering LED solutions, it is unlikely that they will have the performance-centric mentality needed to achieve the desired results of your flood lighting conversion project. A key step in any LED projects is to understand that LED technology is not a commodity. Previous decades included building facility managers and owners assessing product options purely based on cost, assuming that all options considered were of equal quality.
Solution-centric suppliers should ask you questions about project objectives. Are there energy reduction targets, lighting performance requirements, and budget constraints, etc? The right partners will expect to know the results you want rather than just what specific products they could sell to you. It is unequal for all LED products. For different applications, different manufacturers have different value levels. You will finally get the best result through working with companies, who have the product expertise to recommend solutions that meet your project priorities.