Understanding LED Wall Packs (Styles, Lumen Output, & More)

Full Transcript

Kevin
This is Kevin Kohlert here with Charlie with the second episode of our LED lighting podcast at CommercialLEDLights.com, and today we're gonna talk about outdoor lighting, specifically one of the most common types of outdoor lighting fixtures. “LED Wall Pack lights”.

So I'm with Charlie here, and I'd like to start off with Charlie, you know, this is one of the more common things that are sold at CommercialLEDLights.com. So I just want to start with, what is a wall pack? Let's just give an overview to those who don't know.

Charlie
Sure, sure. A wall pack is an exterior wall mounted light fixture and it's designed to distribute light down and out. So there's a variety of different options that are available depending on how much light you want down and how much light you want to throw ‘out’ more like a flood light almost, but attached to the wall. So we'll touch on the three main types of wall packs here shortly and kind of walk through if you're looking for more down, more out or a combination of both. So, but generally speaking, that's the overview.

Kevin
Okay, so yeah, they're like security lights on the exterior of commercial buildings. You see that a lot.

Charlie
Yeah, they’re for security perimeter lighting around the building. Oftentimes there's parking lot lights and those aren't going to shine as close to the building as you want. So the wall packs gonna fill that need between the building and your parking.

Kevin
Now, LEDs are used for this type of lighting, like a lot of things, a lot of places, businesses are switching to LEDs. What's the difference between Metal Halides and LED lights because metal highlights are the old school type of wall pack.

Charlie
Yeah metal halide is the kind of legacy technology and most all commercial lighting from parking lots, to high bays, to definitely in wall packs as well. And that's using.., it's a light bulb and for all intents and purposes. And however they burn hot. They take a while to warm up. Especially outdoors in cool environments. That's often a downside, and they won't get as bright when they're in a cold environment as they would otherwise in a warmer, moderate environment. Whereas LED, that the benefit is that they're gonna turn on right away. But really what most people are going to it just for energy savings you're gonna drop it between 50 to 75% in terms of energy consumption. When you switch over to LED, so you get better light, longer lasting light, you have to replace metal highlights relatively frequently. Often you know I would say 2 to 4 times as frequently as you would with an LED. Depending on the environment, and you're going to save quite a bit of money on your electric bill.

Kevin
Better savings, better technology, brighter light. So you can't really go wrong.

Charlie
Exactly.

Kevin
And so I know some, some governments, local governments even give rebates for switching to LEDs.

Charlie
Yeah, local governments. Local utilities, a lot of utilities will yes, subsidize your purchase essentially when you retrofit and transition from a legacy technology to LED.

Kevin
Makes sense. Alright, so there's different like, so we talked about generally what a wall pack is, but there's my understanding is there's different styles of wall packs. Can we touch base on that?

Charlie
Yeah, there's three kind of categories if you will. There's the standard wall pack, there's a full cutoff wall pack and a semi cutoff wall pack. And what those are going to do is offer, kind of what we touched on early on when we're talking about just generally what wall pack is, as a standard wall pack is going to provide light down. And it's going to provide a lot of light out, flooding the environment out from the wall. A full cut off wall pack is really just going to shine light down and kind of wash that wall with light and shine light very little light out. And the semi cutoff wall pack, it's kind of in between that, it's gonna go down, but it's gonna, it's also gonna broadcast some light out as well.

So why are there these three different types of wall packs? Well, a big reason is, is dark sky compliance, which is a set of regulations that only allow so much light to go basically to shine up. And it's a mechanism to control light pollution. So depending on if you have to be dark sky compliant or if your municipality wants you to be, then you might have to pick a semi cutoff wall pack or a full cutoff wall pack. That's one, the bigger reason might be simply is if you have a building that is a budding, say, a residential or different use and you put a standard wall pack up, you're going to have a lot of light bleed into that, your neighboring environment. And there's actually building codes, federal building codes that most municipalities will implement, that say, you know, if you're so many feet to a different, say a residential, then you cannot have X amount of light bleeding into that. And to achieve that you have to use a cutoff or semi cutoff wall pack. So, you want the light on your perimeter, you want a little bit of light out however, you can't have it go out 30, 40, 50 ft, like a standard wall pack might.

So there's the federal codes and then there's also local municipalities that might even ratchet that down even tighter. So it's important to check those regulations prior to buying sometimes.

Kevin
That's why it's beneficial to work with LED lighting expert before your purchase. All right, And how do you actually choose? Like how many lumens, that are watts because, you know, there's a few different watts, and lumens ranges when it comes to wall packs, like many lights.

Charlie
Yeah, so, wall packs do come in a variety of watts. And if you're looking to light, you know, a small area, say just something simply around the door, you have like a man door that you want to enter and it's pretty well lit, but you want just a little bit more. You can go with a small, like standard, we call mini wall packs, but it's really just a standard wall pack, but very small, say 20 or 30 watts. And that will provide light in a relatively small area. And on the other end of the spectrum would be something like a large manufacturing plant or distribution center where you have a building that may have a wall that's hundreds of feet long and potentially a parking lot adjacent to the building. In that case you're gonna want to go with something like a 120 watt wall pack. And that will provide quite a bit of light, not only downward, but it's going to provide a lot of light out from the building well. And those are usually, I used to like actually lightening some of the parking lot and complimenting your parking lot lights that you have. So that those are kind of the two broad ends of the spectrum if you will.

Kevin
Sure. And I think like a lot of them, a lot of them now are dusk to dawn. A lot of these wall packs have something called a motion sensor, Photocell. My mistake.

Charlie
Yeah, so the photo cells are very handy in the sense that if you don't want to put a timer on that circuit, or maybe your circuit is also part of some different lighting. So, a timer is gonna not be applicable to turn on and off, and then you also have to set the timer based on daily savings and the days getting shorter and longer. So oftentimes the easiest thing to do is just to put a photocell on. And the photocell just senses when the light decreases to a certain level it kicks on. And then in the morning when it gets bright enough, it just turns off for you so you can just provide that light power, constant power and it's gonna turn itself on and off. You can get a photocell that's in line. So it's one photocell connected to many lights for your wall packs, and that will turn them all on at the same time. But what a lot of people do is just get a wall pack, which we carry plenty of them that have photocells pre-built in. So you just wired up, install it, you're done, easy as that.

Kevin
I see, I see. And so I kind of like to just wrap things up here with, I mean this is a lot of great information on wall packs. I wanna just talk about what are the most common applications like who typically buys these wall packs on your experience?

Charlie
Typical buyers are definitely builders, commercial builders, property managers of commercial buildings. Those are probably the biggest ones, and then electrical contractors that are working with all the building owners and property managers, building companies and so on. Anyone that's working on a commercial, oftentimes warehouse distribution, industrial type facility, that's where you're gonna usually find this product.

Kevin
Makes sense. Makes sense. Alright, well that's about all this has been very informative and I appreciate the insights on wall packs, Charlie.

Charlie
You're welcome.

Kevin
Alright. Until next time.