Parking Lot Light Pole: Tips for Maximizing Your LED Lighting
Having parking lot lights can do wonders for your energy savings, but it is also one of the most efficient ways to light up your space and make sure that it is safer for traffic and for pedestrians. But before you take the plunge, there are several factors to consider when installing LED parking lot lights. Here are a few tips that can help you make the most of your new LED lighting.
1. Strategic Underground Lighting
When placing LED parking lot lights in underground parking spaces, make sure that you have the light fixtures spread out and placed strategically. Underground parking lots have several pipelines and facilities that can interfere with light. There is also a minimal amount of natural light that comes in with underground parking lots. This creates more shadow and blind spots, so make sure that your lights are evenly and strategically placed.
2. Install Transition Lighting
It takes the human eye a few moments to adjust to new lighting, even if the difference is just minimal. This may not be a problem with pedestrians, but this could cause problems for drivers. That is why it is important to have transition lights at the entrances to parking lots. This way, drivers can adjust to the brightness of the LED parking lot lights as they enter the parking area. Transition lights often have the right amount of brightness for drivers coming in.
3. Proper Horizontal and Vertical Lighting
The ideal lights for parking spaces should be similar to sidewalk lighting. This means that there should be enough vertical light to see the ground all the way to the top of the light fixture. But with parking spaces, there should also be enough horizontal lighting for proper illumination between cars. LED parking lot lights provide great horizontal and vertical illumination.
4. Choose the Right Entrance Light Colors
Most entrance lights or transition lights use higher colors in the rendering index. These lights have a closer range to natural light, which makes it easier to transition from one environment to another. There are a lot of LED parking lot lights that have a more natural light making them perfect for transition or entrance lighting.
5. Have Proper Ambient Lighting
One of the many functions of your parking lot lights is to create an ambient light that lights up the entire parking lot to make it more welcoming and less claustrophobic. This is especially true for small and enclosed parking lots. LED parking lot lights can create great ambient light as long as there are enough light fixtures and they are spread out evenly throughout the parking lot area.
6. Install Signs that work well with LED Parking Lot Lights
Most of the signs that are used in parking lots have their own light source, or they can have reflective surfaces. While this is important to make sure that these signs are seen by the public, this can cause glare that can be irritating or distracting to a driver. One of the advantages of having LED parking lot lights is that most signs can be properly illuminated without glare through indirect lighting. You can easily see and distinguish these signs without the use of other light sources.
7. Upgrade before Replacement
When it comes to changing over to LED parking lot light pole, you may need to replace your entire lighting system. But if you have modern light fixtures, you may not need to do that. If you have upgraded in the past few years, chances are that your fixtures are still compatible with LED lights. This makes it easier to upgrade your bulbs instead of replacing all of the light fixtures in your parking lot.
8. Show the Parking lot Markings
When it comes to parking lot lights, one of the requirements should be that the markings on the parking lot floor should be seen. Not only does this help with parking cars in the right angle and direction, but it also helps drivers to see the directions they should be driving in when entering and looking for a parking space, as well as exiting the parking area. This should be one of your priorities when setting up your parking lot lights.
9. Strategic Outdoor Ground Parking Lot Lights
There is a difference when lighting outdoor parking lots and indoor lots. There is a smaller lighting period for outdoor parking lots because of the prolonged exposure to natural light and daylight. It also tends to be much brighter during the start and at the end of the day. But, you also have to consider that your lighting fixtures have to be much more durable and they have to be outfitted with weatherproof fixtures and casings because they are always exposed to the outdoors.
10. Proper Lighting Layout
When outfitting your parking lots, you have to make sure that the lights are spread out in a reasonable layout. You should take into account the angle of the light and how the ground gives light contribution to the area. This is important to keep the light within the parking lot and minimize the light pollution outside of the parking lot area. This is why LED parking lot lights are usually better for smaller spaces, while more powerful floodlights are used on parking spaces with larger areas.
