12 Tips to Select the Best Outdoor LED Flood Lights and Manufacturers

You are having the lighting project at hand, or discovering the tender that is related to your business. How can I choose the proper LED flood lights from the best manufacturer? There are many shoddy goods in the market, how can I identify them? Since CFL and halogen lights are going to be banned in Europe, it is high time to replace the traditional lights such as metal halide, HPS, LPS and halogen with LED flood light. And you will see majority of the lighting tender involves LED replacement. LED is already widely used in our daily lives, such as outdoor sports field lighting, warehouse lighting, street & tunnel lighting, and so on.

How to choose the best LED flood light manufacturer?

Experienced manufacturer

Experience is the most straightforward proof of whether a manufacturer is qualified or not. But at the same time, chances are that some of them may provide false claim. To check the year of establishment of a LED company, we can search in the authoritative website. For instance, if you are buying the flood lamps from Chinese factories, you can get into alibaba.com page to see how old this supplier is.

You will find the number of years before the name of the company. We have 12 years’ experience and complete countless LED lighting project such as stadium lights for Olympic Games and Premier League home stadium, international airports, warehouse, port and so on.

Warranty of LED flood lights

Apart from looking at how many years of warranty can they offer, we also need to beware of if they genuinely provide the support within the warranty period. In fact, there are many manufacturers that shirk their responsibilities to the customers, such as wrong installation, wrong places and etc. Nonetheless, we give prompt support to the customers within or even outside the warranty period. It is because we strive to build the long term & healthy business relationship with our clients.

Own R&D team

This is essential when it comes to choosing a good supplier. High power LED flood lights up to 1000 to 4000W is a relatively new technology in LED lighting field (starting from 00s). If the companies develop the flood lamp by themselves, they will know their product thoroughly, and thus they can give you the best lighting opinion and tips when using the lights. LedsMaster is a flood light manufacturer owning an experienced R&D team. All of our products are developed and fabricated by our engineers and workers. Our target is to make the up-to-date and best flood lights for every outdoor or indoor large areas.

High adaptability

All projects have different requirement, such as brightness, number of fixtures and poles, installation height and other special needs. In order to execute the best lighting solutions for sports field, commercial or industrial lighting, we need to ensure that the flood lamp adapts to the change. Sometime our client will chance the requirement before closing the tender. What the best manufacturer should do is to have high adaptability. We always be responsive and listen to our customers.

How to choose the right outdoor LED flood lights?

Quality LED chips

For the leading brands in this industry like Bridgelux and Cree, they master the most advanced technologies such as SMD and COB for their LED chips, and thus the malfunction rate is very low. But you will expect that the price is higher. It is highly recommended to select the LED flood lights that use the mainstream chips manufacturer.

High luminous efficiency

This determines the extend of energy saving of your LED lights. “Lumen per watt” is the unit indicating the energy efficiency. For example, a LED with 150 lumens per watt mean 1W power generates 150 unit of light and brightness. And hence, you will know that the lights with 150 lm/W is more energy saving than 120lm/W.

Right beam angle

Beam angle indicates how spread the light would be. For the high mast or high bay application, if the beam angle is wide, although the uniformity is very high, the ground brightness is very low. On the contrary, too narrow beam angle makes the lighting uniformity very low because it creates many “spots” despite of its high brightness. And thus, there is a perfect balance between uniformity and brightness. Our engineers are proficient in doing the photometric analysis and thus guarantee better lighting outcome for any kinds of projects.

Good heat dissipation

It avoids the LED flood light being damaged due to overheating. A good heat sink should be made of pure aluminum which has high heat conducting rate of 238 W/mk – higher the value, higher the conductivity rate. The heat conducting rate of die cast iron is only 54.4W/mk.

When it comes to the structural design, a good heat dissipation system should be consisted of ample air ventilation passage inside the lamp. As you can see from the above picture, there are hollow structure and space between each row of LED chips to assist heat transfer from the light body to the surrounding.

Then, the heat dissipation area should be large. The heat dissipation system has dense aluminum fins array to speed up the cooling process, and thus protect the flood lamps.

Waterproof of outdoor flood lights

IP66 is a must. For certain environments, IP67 or IP68 is required such as underwater fountain lights or fishing lights. Apart from direct water immersion when using the lights, the IP66 rated flood lamps can work under the inclement weather, which is essential in outdoor sports field, airport, street light and more.

Extra tips on sports flood lighting

There are 3 extra tips for you regarding to sports field lamps.

Color rendering index (CRI)

This is an index showing you how well the color will be revealed under a certain illumination. In sports lighting, CRI 80 is required. Sometimes we will need extra high CRI of 90 to 95 for art gallery, museum or broadcasting.

Glare rate (light leakage)

Which is seldom mentioned but it is also essential for sports lighting – too much leakage will irritate the audiences and players, it also reduce the brightness on the targeted areas. Our flood lamps adopt the advanced lens that concentrated the light beam to the area we want and reduce the light leakage by 50%.

Flickering issue

Although flickering might not be observable by naked eyes, it can be significant under cameras, especially slow motion. Our flickering rate (lumen fluctuation amplitude) is less than 0.3% of the total lumen, and hence even the 4K TV broadcasting camera will not have noticeable flickering if the sports field use our LED flood lights.

If you would like to get the lighting design and free photometric analysis, please do not hesitate to shoot us a message to beatus@ledsmaster.com