Parking Lot Lighting Design Guide

parking lot site

Parking lot lighting is one of the most common outdoor lighting applications in commercial solar lighting. The light should provide good illuminance levels in terms of the size and needs of the parking lot.

Parking Lot Lighting Design Guide

The lighting design for parking lots varies in terms of the category of the parking lot. In the layout,
SOLTECH uses foot-candle (fc) as the unit of measure used for quantifying light levels. One foot-candle is equal to one lumen per square foot. The illuminating engineering society (IES) has established recommended acreage maintained foot-candle levels for a broad range of applications to ensure the illumination and safety for the area.

To reduce light pollution especially in rural and suburban areas, the illumination requirements are different in terms of the location of the parking lot. The requirements for parking lot in urban area and suburban area can be founded below:

lighting design requirement
Parking Lot Design & Planning Process

In general, the parking lot functions as the safe area to place vehicles and ensure pedestrians walking around. The lighting requirement for the parking lot varies in terms of the parking lot location, type, and activity frequency.

When conducting a photometric analysis for the parking lot, the lighting designer should not only consider the standard lighting requirement, but take factors that may affect the light in a real scenario into account. For example, the location of the project can indicate the weather and daily temperature of the parking lot, which may affect the solar panel intake efficiency; The designer should avoid installing fixtures near trees or in the shadow of the tree; Other than that, if the site has existing poles, designers should select the fixtures based on the pole EPA… In addition to those external environmental factors, the manufacturer should also focus on the wattage, lumen output, light distribution as well.

The following figures indicate how SOLTECH designed the layout during past projects.

Costa Rica Parking Lot Project
Costa Rica Parking Lot Project (Day)
Costa Rica Parking Lot Project
Costa Rica Parking Lot Project (Night)

The figures show the series of projects SOLTECH has been doing in Costa Rica since 2019. The new parking lot is building up the lighting system with our SUNLIKE 20W and SUNLIKE 30W. In this site, both single-head and double-head fixtures were applied. The double-head installation can not only provide better uniformity of the light, but also save poles, which helps property to reduce the cost a lot.

The Benefits of SOLTECH Parking Lot Solar Lights

SOLTECH commercial LED lights can be a perfect solution to either a parking lot retrofit program, or a newly developed parking site. We provide a complete solar lighting product family for the parking lot, which will meet different requirements based on the client’s customized needs.

In addition to the all-in-one design SUNLIKE, we also provide SATELIS and CEGONIA, which offer higher energy output to larger space with separated solar panels that are flexible to adjust orientation in any cases.

We consider better uniformity rather than sell more fixtures
One of the most common misunderstandings about lighting design is that the quantity of the lighting fixtures is not related to the lighting quality directly. Most security cameras are rated for both very high and low lighting levels, but are badly limited by the contrast ranges. Therefore, the uniformity of the light can be the essential metrics to measure the light performance, as it aids in viewing images on the camera as well as people’s physical interaction in the parking lot.

More Remote Control Modes, More Savings
Most parking lights are lit for 13+ hours per day. As a result, lighting controls can be essential to save
energy when lights are not used frequently. A lot of parking lots are empty or no physical interaction during certain periods at night. SOLTECH solar lights offer six different operation modes that enable users to maximum usability and energy during the usage period. For example, the motion sensor mode can be greatly useful, as it will automatically detect motions around and turn on the light when vehicles or pedestrians pass by. We also noticed that people tend to park the vehicle close to the building or center of the zone, so the customer can set up different operation hours based on the customer’s preference.

In general, creating layout or lighting design is not simply calculating the fixtures on a site, while SOLTECH designers will take potential energy savings, best cost-effectiveness, user satisfaction, lighting controls into consideration.

Flexible Solutions for Personalized Needs

U.S Made CEGONIA BAA

CEGONIA is a perfect alternative for SUNLIKE. Different
from the all-in-one design fixtures, CEGONIA has a
separated solar panel and light head, which enable it to rotate the solar panel and lighting head separately
based on the needs. The efficiency for both SUNLIKE & CEGONIA is 200 lm/w, which is the highest efficiency output in the industry

SATELIS meets the lighting requirements for major
roads and parking lots. Equipped with more powerful
solar panels and higher capacity lithium battery packs
to ensure battery run time, SATELIS Series is designed
to withstand the most extreme weather and harsh
environments. Featuring a 50–150 watt LED fixture,
up to 2 solar panels, and an output of up to 15,000
lumens, SATELIS is perfect for most commercial
applications.

Pro series product picture

In addition to the standard product line, SOLTECH will expand our capability in cold areas. Our Pro series is an advanced solar lighting solution for the cold climate. SOLTECH adopted unique, innovative battery technology to overcome the shortcomings of the solar lighting system’s cold-weather performance. The super cold-tolerant battery technology provides excellent low temperature charge and discharge performance.

Reference Article:

  1. alameda-streelight-guidedec2020update.pdf (alamedaca.gov)
  2. Outdoor Lighting – California Energy Commission
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