Often overlooked, the parking lot is an important component of your overall customer experience. Parking lots that are dimly lit and hard to navigate can create a bad impression for new customers and long-time patrons. Having lighting with a high color rendering index and one that allows customers to move about safely is critically important for any facility manager. In today’s post, we are going to look at LED parking lot lighting and the ways this technology can not only improve the aesthetics of your facility but also your bottom line.

Issues with HID Lighting

To understand the merits of switching to LED lighting technology we must first understand how conventional HID lighting works.

• With conventional lighting, much of the energy that is created is lost due to heat and not light. This results in higher energy consumption than necessary and therefore higher costs.
• The other disadvantage to using HID lights is that these bulbs create omni-directional (light in all directions) light. That is lighting that needs to be directed downward toward the surface below.
• Finally, HID lights have many more mechanical components, things like: filaments, contact wires, and glass mount. Each one of these components in the bulb creates a potential “failure point” for the bulb.

 

Merits of LED Lighting

So now that we understand the issues that are associated with HID lighting we need to understand how light-emitting diode (LED) lighting will address each one of these issues.

• LEDs have a much better light to heat ratio than HID bulbs, meaning they lose much less energy due to heat loss. So they are inherently more efficient and cost less to run.
• Additionally, LED’s produce a directional light instead of omni-directional light. So the light is generated from the LED bulb does not need to be reflected or directed to the appropriate surface.
• Finally, LED lights have a larger footprint than HID fixtures, what this means is that you will need less fixtures to light the same exact space when lighting with HID fixtures.

In addition to the energy efficiency benefits, directional light benefits, and the larger lighting footprints, LED pole lights use roughly 50% to 75% less wattage when compared to traditional parking lot lighting. Depending on the size of your facility this can be a dramatic cost savings for facility managers and building owners.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we can see that there are enormous benefits of switching to LED lighting. Both from a cost savings perspective and from an overall aesthetic professionalism perspective. If you have additional questions after reading the post above, please reach out to us here at Action Services Group. by calling 610-558-9773, email [email protected], or schedule a call that fits your needs by clicking the button below. We would be happy to put together a free no-obligation assessment for your facility. We look forward to speaking with you.