Understanding LED Flood Lights (Styles, Mounting, & More)

Full Transcript

Kevin
This is Kevin Kohlert with the Commercial LED Lighting podcast. I'm here with the owner Charlie here, and today we're gonna talk about LED floodlights. This is the third episode of our podcast and floodlights is one of the most commonly used lighting fixtures for outdoor environments. So what I want to do is just kind of start off here Charlie, how you doing?

Charlie
Good, how are you doing, Kevin?

Kevin
Good, good. Doing well, thanks. And let's just start off right off the bat. What are floodlights?

Charlie
Floodlights is a generally broad category that has lots of applications and in many respects, the name speaks for itself. It's meant to flood the area with light, it's not very directed in most cases, we will touch on some lensing that you can do to direct it a bit, but it is meant to cover generally large areas of light and there's a few different applications for that, that will jump into.

Kevin
You see these a lot and like for security lighting and commercial businesses, you see them on top of roofs, you see them on poles, you see them kind of illuminating signs. I mean probably everybody has actually seen one.

Charlie
Yeah, yeah, they're, they're extremely common. Most every parking lot has a floodlight style generally yeah, billboards that are, that are externally lit. Oftentimes, buildings whether it's for security or just architectural purposes, frankly you can ground mount them and angle them up onto the building to give it some architectural effect. So really the big buckets on floodlights is, is that ground mount. And then you also have the building mount, so they would often times you might see them like on the top of a gas station roof mounted and angled down into the parking lot or into a certain area they're looking to illuminate.And then the pole mount, probably the most common in the parking lot. And and road applications, sometimes floodlights are using road applications, although there are specific road lights, but neighborhood streets and so on. Often a floodlight will do the job.

Kevin
Okay. Yeah, important for security and general illumination. My understanding is that there are some accessories with floodlights too. It's a very popular lighting option, so motion sensors is one of the common.

Charlie
Yeah, there's, there's, there's two main ones that our customers are looking for motion and more commonly would be the photocell. So you can mount a photocell accessory on most of the floodlights we offer. And what that will do is when it gets dark outside, the light automatically turns on when it's light outside automatically turns off. So that gets rid of having to set up like a timer. You know, a lot of buildings, especially older buildings, will have a mechanical mechanical timer that you have to go in and change it every month as the days get shorter or they get longer or daily savings times hits and oftentimes they're not, so your lights are coming on too early or they're coming on too late. Whereas you can just have for relatively inexpensively frankly a sensor that just goes on every light and they just turn on and off. It doesn't matter what time of year it is, doesn't matter, you know, daylight savings. So that's a, that's a very nice feature that is commonly ordered and then there's motion sensors which are not quite as common on floodlights. However, you may not want the light on in some areas all the time at night. So, you can have the motion sensor and it will just trip on or some other interesting applications. We just had a customer That had some catalytic converter thefts actually and they needed, what they wanted to do was light their parking lot very well, but they kind of oversized their light a little bit and they put these motion sensors on. So what happens is the lights will dim down to 50 or 60% when there's no motion. So there's always very good light coverage and once that motion sensor trips, it will then illuminate to 100%. So I thought that was kind of a creative way to utilize the motion sensor. And the nice thing with LED is, it's not just an on off, you can have it dimmed down to 25 or 50 or 75% and then once the motion happens, you can program the light to go up to whatever it is you want and then it will then dim that down over a certain period of time.

Kevin
And now with floodlights, there's a lot of different ways to mount them as we kind of alluded to earlier. My understanding is you can mount them there is a very flexible lighting option, you can mount them on the ground.. Let's talk about some of the mounting options with floodlights.

Charlie
So every floodlight you are going to have to make a decision on what type of mount you want and what your application is. So if this is a ground mount small, we didn't really touch on it, you might use like a knuckle mount, which literally might just be a spike in the ground attached to it screws on or you might have some sort of foundation that was set or something that you might be able to use a yoke mount or trunnion mount, which is basically, it's just a mount that allows the light to angle up and down. Those mounts are also commonly used on buildings, you could literally screw them into a building or they wouldn't pull and it allows you to angle the light. That's a yoke or trunnion. Now, when you get into parking lot lights, there's a couple different common type of mounts. The two most common are gonna be slip fitter, which is just a round, there'd be a round arm coming off your parking lot pole and the light would just slide over that round arm and then there's bolts to snug it up. And that also allows you to angle it up and down a little bit, which is nice. It's a very common application and the second most common application is an arm mount. And if you have square parking lot poles, this arm tends to look a little bit better, a little bit more finished off if you will to. It uses a standard bolt pattern you order it with the arm mount and what that does, well those bolts will slide through the existing holes in your square pole. And then you snug them up and bolt them in from the inside. So that is an option that does not allow you any up and down. It will be at a 90° angle off the pole, but it is a nice finished look. A lot of people like to use those. So between the slip fighter in the arm, that's really your parking application.

Kevin
And my understanding is with parking lot lighting there are square poles, there are round poles and there are various brackets that you can mount it on, you look in a parking lot and there's these huge parking poles. There's these lights all the way up and stuff and so I just want to talk about the differences in poles. I think some of them are standardized.

Charlie
Yeah, like I mentioned, it's mostly industry standard, luckily with the bolt, but you know, they call bolt pattern. So if you get that arm mount from us and you and your parking, poles are standard, which they probably are going to be frankly, it will be like a plug and play situation. It would just bolt right up. You can take your old legacy metal halide or whatever it is that you might be using and popping back on and same thing with the slip fitter. That round pole is an industry standard. However, since those bolts after you slide it on and you screw these, there's three bolts that go around. It allows for a little plain adjustment if you're not using it for, say it's a very old pole or whatever it might be that that's not using the standard.

Kevin
Alright. Yeah, great, very informative. I know there's different types of lenses as well, even with floodlights, two types, type three?

Charlie
There’s three main types of lenses. And what that allows you to do is you can't see it from looking at the physical fixture, but the lens over each LED typically will cast the light in a different way and our most popular type of lenses are the ‘Type Three’ and ‘Type Five’ and basically, Type Five does exactly what you think it does. It just shines light evenly in all directions. That's what Type Five does. So if you have, if you're trying to light up an area of grass or yard or parking in the poles like you know, in the center of the parking lot, that's gonna be your best option, typically. The other common is the Type Three, and what that does is broadcast light out and sideways, and not as much behind the light and where that comes in handy is when you have perimeter parking poles. So the other three types are very uncommon. Some create kind of cast long narrow ovals. You know, if you're looking to do like a center median or something like that. But really it's those Type Three and Five. And what that does is cover your perimeter in your center parking areas and/or your building mounted where you're looking to cover as much area as possible with the Type Five.

Kevin
Alright, fair enough. I think that covers it for lenses. So with with all of this information we hope this is informative and as more and more parking lot and outdoor environments start switching from the old metal halide, you know those big shoe box style lights to the slimmer easier mounted LED floodlights that I think this will be great information for people who are listening.

Charlie
I hope so.

Kevin
All right, That's about all until next time.