Commercial LED Outdoor Lighting
Commercial LED outdoor lighting is the best way to make your facility feel safe and welcoming, while minimizing upkeep and costs.
For any business, first impressions matter. Ensuring quality lighting around the exterior of your facility or shop is critical. Successful exterior lighting accomplishes four main goals: enhancing security, making it safer and easier to use, creating the right feeling, and minimizing maintenance costs. Commercial LED outdoor lighting is the best way to achieve these goals.
Knowing which of the above goals you’re most focused on accomplishing will determine which LED outdoor light fixtures are best for you. For example, if your priority is making sure pedestrians can easily find the entrance to the building, that solution will look different than if your biggest concern is making the outside of the building look even and symmetrical. Check out our wall pack buying guide.
Enhancing Security with Outdoor Lighting
Effective outdoor lighting has a massive impact on security. It can deter trespassers and make people feel seen. This is a good feeling for anyone who simply wants to enjoy the space or move safely through it, but a bad feeling for anyone who wants to avoid witnesses to their actions.
In short, you want to make your property (and therefore your customers, tenants, and employees), a wildly unappealing target. Proper lighting can also help you get the most out of your security footage, ensuring you can see doorways and individuals more clearly, should you need to intervene or view the footage after an incident.
Lighting Products that Can Handle Security Duty
Exterior lights need to be able to withstand being exposed to rain, snow, wind, dust, and other aspects of nature. They also need to remain consistent in terms of output and color purity. That means ensuring you have fixtures graded for outdoor use.
Finally, consider the placement light spread of your lights. You’ll need to make sure you plan for maintenance, so any single outage doesn’t have an overreaching negative impact on the lighting of your facility. You’ll also want to check for any shadowy pockets that detract from the sense of safety you’ve crafted. Your lighting is only as effective as the darkest place people have to navigate. Meanwhile, you want to avoid any areas of excessive light that will create an unpleasant level of contrast with the surroundings or create an “interrogation room” effect.
Selecting the Best Color Light for Increased Security
When people can see clearly and accurately, they are more likely to relax and
feel comfortable using the space. Most people associate more yellow, tungsten-looking light with higher risk situations, so they feel safer with natural to cool whites. Sometimes, you might select a slightly warmer option for entrances, to make the space seem more inviting.
Outdoor Lighting for Safety, Accessibility, and Usability
Clear visibility is required for anyone visiting your industrial facility after dark. This includes making sure they know where they’re going, but also the many ways they navigate the parking lot, pathways, docks, and entrances and exits.
Curbs, uneven pavement, unmarked ramps, as well as pools or water or blocks of ice are all dangers that can be mitigated with strong, consistent outdoor lighting.
Creating the Right Mood, Atmosphere, and Experience with Outdoor LED Lights
This goal of exterior lighting can likely be achieved at least in part with the same lights you’ve chosen for their security and safety features. Using high quality fixtures and creating consistency throughout your footprint will go a long way.
Here are a few tips for using outdoor LED lights to shape the experience your guests enjoy in your outside space:
- Consider your landscape and layout, and look for outdoor light fixtures you can easily conceal. This will not only make the space look better, it will help protect
your lights from rain and other harsh weather conditions. - Emphasize strong lines for a modern, geometric look that corresponds with your architecture. Outdoor strip lights are an excellent choice for this effect.
- Backlight interesting details, coves, and features.
- Give people a reason to look up. You can achieve this through downlights, patio string lights, in-ground well lights, and more.
Maintenance and Upkeep
It isn’t enough to achieve the three objectives listed above. Commercial buildings need to be able to accomplish all of their lighting needs while protecting their bottom line. That means selecting the products that have the longest life span and use the least energy (LEDs are the clear choice here).
Best Products for Outdoor LED Lighting
Canopy Lights
Canopy lights are excellent choices for gas stations, parking garages, and loading docks, which when poorly lit, are all popular targets for criminals.
Wall Packs
Wall packs are mounted on exterior walls to provide even light across the outside of commercial buildings. These continuous lights make it easy to see who is in the vicinity, as well as what they’re doing. This means being able to spot suspicious behavior easily, for quick intervention.
Flood and Area Lights
Flood lights are a good choice for constant, large swaths of bright light that make it impossible to hide. These can be combined to cover as much ground as you need and come with a variety of features for your needs.
Deck and Step Lighting
Make decks and steps more prominent, appealing, and easy to see with LED accent or step lights, such as recessed, strip, or surface-mount lights.
In-Ground Well Lights
These low-profile well lights are installed in pathways and in landscapes to accent and accentuate features and improve visibility.
Spotlights
Spotlights are small narrow beams of light that are excellent choices for wayfinding, signage, as well as entrances and exits, to make it easy for people to find their way in the dark.
Lighting for parking may not be an obvious
operational cost, however, the savings can really add up.
How you choose to light your parking lots and garages depends on how you’re using it.
Bollards
Bollards can lighten pathways and driveways, as well as natural areas, to keep people’s feet on the intended path and out of your landscape or hardscape areas. From a distance, it makes it clear where the paths are located, which prevents people from wandering in the incorrect part of your facility’s exterior.
LED Parking Lot Lighting
Controlling for Light Spillage
If you have an outdoor parking lot, there may be local ordinances that prevent light from spilling outside the bounds of your parking lot. This would impact the light spread that will work for your application and flood lights may be less appropriate. In that case, you would want to consider lenses that reduce unwanted light spillage, compared with traditional shoe box fixtures, which contain a reflector and HID light bulb. Not only that, some states have strict requirements related to color temperature, due its effect on local wildlife, while others have local differences in what is considered “light pollution.”
Depending on what region or state you’re in, we can help you untangle and understand the impact of local codes on the products you use to illuminate your parking areas. Contact us today.
Evaluating Your Parking Area Usage
There are some significant factors you need to consider when purchasing outdoor lighting for your parking lot or structure:
- Will there be heavy pedestrian traffic?
- Is there an area for shipping or loading, as well as parking?
- Do employees park in a designated area, and if so, how far do they have to walk and what wayfinding do they need? If there is a shuttle to take them to their
job site, what kind of light will keep them safe and satisfied? - What do you need to do to avoid glare that will interfere with drivers’ ability to see properly?
- What kind of signage and wayfinding is necessary and what is your plan to make that clear and visible at all times of the day?
- What parts of your parking structure will lead your lights and fixtures exposed to the elements?
Retrofitting Parking with LEDs
If you’re retrofitting your parking lot, you don’t have the freedom of determining the number and placement of poles or deciding what height you want. That makes it even more important to select the best product for your environment. That means looking at the optics and beam pattern, the wattage and lumen output, and the correct voltage for your current system.
Dusk to Dawn Parking Solutions
Using a master photocell is an excellent option for LED parking lights. In this situation, all lights are wired to one master photocell, that turns all the lights on or off, based on the available light outside. This saves energy and labor costs year round, adapting smoothly to changes in the sunset and sunrise times during different seasons. Or, if you don’t already have dimming wires run to a master photocell and don’t want to take that on, each light can be outfitted with an individual photocell.
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