Commercial Fluorescent Lights

Guidelines for Contractors Installing Fluorescent Floodlights-
If you want to use fluorescent floodlights to light your client’s building with a uniform beam spread, RLLD Commercial Lighting recommends that you go by the following guidelines in this blog. If you have to vary the lighting levels, you can do this by changing lamp wattage without changing out the fixtures.

Establish the Proper Aiming Points
To get a uniform distribution of light from top to bottom, aim fluorescent floodlights two thirds up the vertical surface. For instance, if the wall is 25 feet high, aim your fixtures 17 feet up from the ground.

What to do with limited setback.
Setback is often encountered. Work with what space you have. The minimum acceptable setback distance is one-quarter the height of the wall. If you have more space, install the fixtures at the same distance from the wall as your aiming point is from the ground. For example, going by our example above, that would be 17 feet back from the building.

Regardless of setback, the spacing between should be twice the setback.
To get optimum uniformity of luminance, space fluorescent floodlights at a distance two times the distance of setback. In our current example, fixtures setback 17 feet from the wall must be spaced 34 feet apart. This causes the light beams to overlap one another, resulting in a uniform spread. If a client is more concerned with cost than with uniformity, however, you may purchase fewer commercial lighting fixtures and vary spacing up to five times the setback distance.

Tell your client about the advantages that fluorescent floodlights offer over inground uplights.
There are times when facilities managers request uplights because they are so easy to conceal and do not intrude into the scene. Nevertheless, they are better used as sign lights, monument lights, or decorative landscape lights. When they are mounted close to a large surface like a building wall, they cast a near vertical beam upward. You cannot achieve uniformity with this type of beam spread.

Get a photometric design from RLLD Commercial Lighting.
The example we provided assumes there is a more or less symmetrical building to light and sufficient acreage to give your team the necessary amount of setback. This ideal scenario is not always found in the real world, however. Real world scenarios are much more complex and demanding, and they often call for more architectural lighting design and installation strategies that take too many billable hours to compute.

It is so much better to have our lighting design team calculate setback and spacing for you. This will also help us recommend the best fixtures to use. This saves time and money for both you and your client, and is sometimes the only way to avoid error if you are installing fluorescent floodlights at a multi-building location.

A 3D photometric lighting design will ensure you will create the appropriate foot candle measurements regardless of the symmetry of the individual buildings, their relationship to each another, and the amount of available setback.

This 3D model is also that you can show to our client that will show them the location and beam spreads of the fluorescent lighting fixtures we recommend. The cost of this photometric design will be deducted from your final invoice total if and when you buy the equipment from us.

If you buy your industrial outdoor products from us, we will refund the value of the photometric design by deducting it from your equipment purchase invoice. This will also save you money on service charges.

RLLD Commercial Lighting carries a wide variety of industrial lighting & commercial parking lot lighting fixtures. If you can not find what you are looking for contact us toll free at 1-866-654-3961 or read one of our many related lighting articles. You never know what you will find at RLLD.

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