Upgrade Parking Lot Lights
A well-lit parking lot is integral to your business. Customers, employees and visitors want a parking lot that feels safe. Even if you have security cameras, the wrong lighting will make them useless. A dark lot is an open invitation to burglars and vandals, and it could affect your liability as well as your bottom line.
In this post we’ll take a look at some popular lighting systems used in parking lots and discuss whether it’s time for an upgrade to durable, cost-effective LED lighting.
Southern Electrical (SESCOS) is a leader in retrofitting LED lights for all types of industries. It’s time to discover the energy saving and expense reduction benefits of LED lights. We can help you get them.
How Safe is Your Lot?
You can use a light meter to determine the foot candle (fc) of your lighting system. Security experts recommend an fc of 2 for low-activity parking lots and 5 fc for high-activity areas.
Light uniformity and color rendition affect how images look on footage from closed-circuit security cameras.
Common Parking Lot Lights
Mercury Vapor: It’s been around since the 1940s, casting its greenish glow on thousands of lots. Mercury vapor is long-lasting but it’s extremely inefficient and has poor color rendition.
Metal Halide: The same lighting used in car lights, metal halide produces a bright white light. It was developed in the 1950s and is more energy-efficient than mercury vapor.
Sodium Lighting: Since their introduction in the 1980s, high-pressure sodium lights have remained a popular choice. They are relatively efficient but their yellowish light offers poor color rendition.
LED Lights: LEDs have been around since the 1950s, but they had certain disadvantages in the past. New LED lights have done away with those problems and now they’re a top choice for any commercial application.
LED Lighting Benefits
- Energy savings: Reductions of 60 to 80 percent.
- Cost saving: Lamps last 10 years or more.
- Safety: Bright, instant light is ideal for motion-sensor lighting.
- Durable: Unaffected by temperature changes or weather conditions.
- Hazard Free: There’s no dangerous glass to break and no toxins to emit.
- Incentives: Some power companies and localities offer tax incentives, discounts and even grants to install green lighting technologies like LEDs.
Ready for the Energy Saving Switch?
If you’re thinking about making the change to LED lights, your first step is to call SESCO for a consultation. We’ll take a look at how well your parking lot measures up in terms of brightness, light uniformity, energy efficiency and other factors. We’ll also help you decide if you need to relamp your fixtures or retrofit your entire system.
Retrofitting
- Provides the most dramatic, immediate cost savings.
- Assures a standard, uniform system.
- Takes longer than relamping and the cost can be higher.
Relamping
- Good solution if you’re not able to invest in a full-scale retrofit.
- Works with your existing fixtures.
- Will pay for itself quickly.
- Expense Reduction, Not Safety Reduction
Switching to LED will save you thousands of dollars while making your parking lot brighter, safer and welcoming to visitors. At SESCO we can show you how to lower your costs without compromising the safety of your employees, clients or vendors. Call us today for a free LED Retrofitting consultation.