Mall Parking Lot Lighting

Mall parking lot lights are important and vital contributors to of high volumes of retail sales. Not only do they provide shoppers with safety, they also maintain optimal visibility. Color rendering should be as near to daylight levels in order to showcase storefront decorations, outdoor displays, and lighting outdoor landscaping features to create an aesthetically pleasing environment. Metal Halide lamps provide the best lighting source for mall parking lots due to their high CRI and their bright white light. When housed in superior, specification grade fixtures, they are also excellent for controlling glare. This is another crucial factor to mall parking lot lighting that warrants careful design and purchasing considerations. Commercial outdoor lighting around mall parking lots experience a high volume of pedestrian traffic, and vehicle traffic in these areas increases as closing time approaches. You must balance horizontal foot-candle density with vertical foot-candle levels in order to allow people walking to clearly see the pavement and for drivers to clearly see and judge distances between themselves and pedestrians.

As a general rule, the higher the parking lot pole, the larger the area its luminaires are able to light. Assuming that the poles do not exceed local length limits established by dark sky laws, steel or concrete lighting poles of up to 50 feet tall can provide superb site lighting for mall parking lots and driveways. It is almost always a good idea to use cut off luminaires when lighting car lots that are made with tempered glass and optical systems with specular facet reflectors. This will result in a more diffused, but nonetheless bright, field of luminance that directs evenly toward the ground with minimal light spillage or glare, and it works toward balancing vertical and horizontal foot candle levels for optimal visibility and safety.

Unfortunately in a recession, retailers often take the greatest hits because people simply don’t want to spend money. One way to propose new parking lot lights to a struggling mall, business building or strip center is to point out to your client that an upgraded facility will not only add visual enhancement, but it will also act as a draw, that requires fewer poles and fixtures than the existing system requires. New strides in lamping design, luminaire optics, and ballast technology allow fewer lamps to function at a higher per lumens watt ratio. This will significantly help your clients remain in full compliance with increasingly strict regulatory codes and dark sky laws that are intended to not only cut back on power consumption, but create a more self-contained field of illumination that will not blind the eyes of passing motorists or spill into the windows of neighboring houses.

Specification grade luminaires of this nature serve to maximize lumens per watt efficiency and help retailers weather the recession with more affordable lighting and power costs. In many instances, specification grade lighting fixtures for mall parking lots can improve energy efficiency as much as 300%. The initial front-end costs for new parking lot lights and poles will help malls immediately begin saving money. This is extremely important to cities such as Houston, TX, where new energy codes will soon become effective that limit outdoor site lighting around malls and parking lots to .15 watts per square foot. Only with the very best halogen fixtures can contractors hope to balance the mandates of code compliance with the obvious necessities of adequate light levels, color rendering, and glare minimization.

RLLD Commercial Lighting carries a wide variety of industrial & commercial lighting fixtures as well as automotive dealership lighting packages. If you can not find what you are looking for call us toll free at 1-866-654-3961 and we will find it for you.

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