Simple Guide to Choosing the Right Solar Parking Lot Lighting

Shifting to solar outdoor lights can significantly reduce your overall utility bill and improve lighting around your parking lot, whether commercial or residential parking lot. However, for improved energy efficiency of outdoor lighting, you need to design a proper solar lighting system and this means choosing the best solar parking lot light fixtures. Solar parking lot lights come in a variety of options for different outdoor applications. Flood lights, for instance, are a common type of recessed lighting used for wall grazing or directional uplighting. Overhead fixtures, on the other hand, are suitable for a wide range of lighting applications including, solar street light, parking lots and roadway lighting.

Finding the right solar parking lights calls for certain considerations to ensure the best results. The layout will determine the types of light fixtures to choose, which varies a lot in terms of light density, distribution, efficacy and color qualities. The local municipals, however, have established codes and requirements that govern the application of streetlighting, including the parking lot lights. Read on to understand some of these factors to help you make an informed decision when purchasing your lights.

Here are some key considerations when choosing the best solar parking lot lighting for your home or business.

1. Designing a Lighting Layout

Creating a lighting layout for your parking lot is essential as it helps to determine the type of lights you need. The layout will essentially consider the mounting height, general light properties such as distribution, brightness, and intensity, the amount of luminaire you may need. Solar parking lot lights need to have a uniform distribution around the lot, neither too bright or dark to eliminate blind spots and allow adequate lighting for surveillance cameras.

If you’re looking for more energy-efficient lighting then you also need to prepare to buy more lights because they’re usually not that powerful. However, you can still buy a few powerful solar parking lights and get adequate illumination on your lot.

2. Conserve Energy

Having your parking lights installed is one thing, but maintaining its efficiency needs deliberate action to ensure the fixtures perform at optimum levels. First, you need to ensure the solar parking lot lights you’re buying come with light and motion sensors to help conserve battery life. The sensors measure radiations produce by human beings and vehicles allowing the light to brighten up upon movements and become dull when there’s no movement detected.

Secondly, you can use lighting controls that respond to the amount of available daylight to either switch on or off the solar lights. This helps to conserve the battery, improving energy efficiency and the durability of your solar lights.

3. Mounting Styles

Depending on the type of light fixtures you use, there are multiple mounting styles and choosing the right one can help illuminate your parking lot more sufficiently. Some of the common outdoor solar parking lights are LED pole lights, which is a suitable alternative to metal halides, and flood lights that also doubles up as an aesthetic lighting option, especially when mounted on walls for directional uplighting and downlighting. Flood lights are a much brighter option than LED lights and are ideal for illuminating a large area. When installing your solar parking lights, whether its pole or flood lights, you also need to consider how high they will be mounted in order to know how many light fixtures you’ll need for your project.

4. Solar and Battery Storage

The most important components of solar parking lights are the solar panel and the battery. When the panels collect sun through the photovoltaic cells, the sunlight is converted to electricity which is stored in a battery and later used for lighting. Therefore, you need a high capacity solar panel and battery combination to ensure you have sufficient power for lighting your parking lot. The panel should be capable of charging the battery within the shortest time possible while the battery has to adequately store power for longer hours of lighting.

Finding the right parking lot lights may not be as straightforward as you could have imagined. However, with these factors in mind, the process may be a little bit easy, helping you to make an informed decision as to what type of parking lot lights to use.