Both interior and exterior lighting has been completely transformed by light emitting diode (LED) technology. These LED lights have increased the lifespan over traditional HID lamps, decreased energy costs, and all while improving the quality of the lighting. In today’s post, we will look at four compelling reasons to use LED lighting for your parking lot applications.
Energy Savings
For any large facility, the energy expense is a significant line item in the monthly budget. Decreasing the energy consumption even by small amounts in each fixture can really affect the overall spend. If we look at the common wattages for LED parking lot lighting the range tends from 40 watts to 60 watts.
If we look at the same wattage for an HID parking lot lights the range would be 400 watts or 1000 watts. So we can see just from making the transition from HID to LED we see a 40%-60% reduction in energy consumption right off-the-bat. From a dollars and cents perspective, this means that your facility could be saving up to $300 per fixture, per year, in electricity costs alone.
Maintenance Cost Reduction
In addition to the significant savings in energy, maintenance costs can also be reduced by switching to LED. Due to the way LED’s generate light, the way they progress through their functional life is much different than their HID counterparts.
Instead of ceasing to function properly once a fuel source is significantly reduced, LED generated light output degrades very slowly over time. As a result, the functional life of an LED product can be significantly longer than that of an HID Lamp...which in turn drastically reduces the costs for maintaining a parking and area fixture over a longer period of time.
Lighting Performance
The performance of your parking and area lighting is of critical importance. Making sure that your patrons feel safe in your parking lot, and ensuring there is plenty of visibility as they walk and drive around is paramount.
From a lighting performance standpoint, LED distribute their light via a multipoint design which gives them a very evenly distributed light pattern on the intended surface.
What this means is that light levels across a given surface will vary less as the distance from the pole or fixture changes.
HID’s, on the other hand, produce a “bright spot” directly underneath the fixture with light levels decreasing drastically as the distance from the pole increases. LEDs are able to mitigate this problem through even distribution. The result is an evener foot candle distribution after installing an LED retrofit.
Finally, due to the even distribution of light, LEDs are available in a range of color temperatures, and as a result, provide a range of options to increase the visual perception of “brightness.”
Safety
Finally, lighting and safety are directly correlated. Having a parking lot that is dimly lit could, and often does lead to unnecessary injury.
By improving the performance of your lighting with LED technology you mitigate this risk. By ensuring that patrons have a high level of visibility, you eliminate potential lawsuits that might emanate from a poorly lit parking lot.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we can see the tangible benefits of LED pole lights for the parking lots. Business owners can expect to see dramatic reductions in energy costs (40% to 60% is a realistic expectation), less frequent maintenance costs, and an overall uptick in lighting performance.
Have you moved your lighting to LEDs yet?