Commercial warehouses generally take too much square metres of surface and are a lot higher buildings than ordinary business properties. Naturally, a space of those measurements would need special features to support the managing of it – think lighting for instance. You can’t install regular lighting in a warehouse because it would be completely useless and it will cause you more difficulties in your work than making it easier. For that purpose, you need heavy duty type of lighting which can be found in three general forms: low and high bay lighting as well as floodlighting solutions. In this post, I’m going to concentrate on the purpose of LED high bays, as the most commonly used type of lighting solution for large commercial warehouses.
What are high bays?
High bays are a type of lighting designed to illuminate an area high as 8 meters or more. Their design’s purpose is to provide a powerful distribution of light for open areas, which is provided by properly used reflectors and optics used in the fitting. That combination of elements guarantees a correct lighting for the commercial area. Commercial warehouses where items are arranged to be picked from a high shelf would benefit largely from a lighting of the kind. Besides illuminating vertical surfaces, LED high bays provide proper lighting on the floors and working planes as well.
What’s their purpose?
As I said, LED high bays serve to illuminate extremely large and high spaces which are in need of a strong and powerful light. Besides this, these light fixtures deliver other benefits that make them a very convenient choice of a lighting source.
- High efficacy: these bays deliver high number of lumens per watt. Think a 100 or more lumens per watt;
- Energy efficient light source: some of the best LED high bays on the market can offer energy efficiency in savings of up to 70% on costs for energy.
- Low maintenance: since these are powerful bays with their own control systems for on/off and dimming effects, they need little to no maintenance at all. They’re backed by warranty of the manufacturer in most cases which makes them highly reliable. However, some examples are designed in a more sophisticated way which requires a certain level of maintenance;
- No bulb disposal: there are bays on the market that feature a bulb with no mercury in it, which means you don’t have to employ special disposal methods for them.
How to choose the right ones
Since these aren’t exactly the cheapest lighting option you could choose, you should be careful when you’re choosing. There are a few important factors to consider:
- Illuminance – there’s a formula you could use to measure this feature, but I’d suggest you go with the easier way and get a luxmeter, which isn’t that expensive. For a large commercial warehouse, you should get bays of 150-250lx of light.
- Lifetime – most of them have a long one. However, you should look for working hours and a solid high bay would offer 5000-50000 hours of work.
- Light colour – generally, industrial lighting should produce from 5000-6000K white light. However, when LED lights are produced, there are certain deviations from the standard.
Bottom line is, LED high bays should be seen as a major investment in your business. And they should be done at the very beginning of starting your work in the warehouse so they make the entire process much easier.
