When creating a safe work environment, for customers or employees, one of the first spots you need to consider is your parking lot lighting. When the visitors and the employees come and go, they are at risk of any hazards or safety issues posed by your parking lot. Often, it potentially leaves you open to litigation for accidents that may occur in areas without adequate parking lot lighting. Sometimes, dark spots in the parking areas can encourage a criminal element. As such, the importance of adequate parking lot lighting cannot be overstated. But when you have decided to transform your parking lot with the LED lighting technology, how many lights will you need?
Focus On Footcandles On The Ground And Uniformity.
Footcandles are the most common unit of measurement used by lighting experts to calculate light levels in outdoor spaces and businesses. A foot-candle, by definition, is the illuminance of a one square foot surface from a uniform source of light. It is, therefore, a measure of the amount of light that reaches a surface area. From a candela light source, light falling on one square foot of area equals one lumen per square foot.
One functional determinant for the adequate light level is the activeness of the area. Sometimes .5 fc can be enough in low activity areas, while in high activity areas, five fc is standard. However, it is not uncommon to find parking lots with a low foot-candle level below the recommendation of lighting experts, which essentially means poor visibility and appeal. Lighting experts recommend a minimum light level of 1 fc throughout the desired area and 2 to 4 fc being more desirable for appeal and optimal visibility.
Lighting uniformity (which translates to the human perception of how evenly illumination is distributed throughout the parking lot) is expressed as the ratio of maximum-to-minimum illumination levels (lowest light level reading and average light level of a specific area). Currently, the recommended ratio for most outdoor parking lot applications is 3:1. With the LED technology, there is excellent uniformity generated due to the inherent quality of these lights. Typically, when lighting lacks uniformity, it is a result of space between the fixtures. Often, other landscaping, such as trees, get in the way, which complicates the uniformity
