LED Strikes the Perfect Balance in Parking Garage Lighting

When considering how to make a parking area easier to navigate, safer and more cost-efficient, lighting can have a tremendous impact on the look and feel, as well as the bottom line. Inadequate lighting may lead to accidents involving falls due to unseen holes, cracks and uneven surfaces. Yet too much light results in high electric bills, unhappy neighbors, and longer re-adaptation to street lighting that can cause accidents.

Now parking garage owners and facility managers can choose lighting options that deliver tremendous energy savings and lower maintenance expenses that provide improved safety and security for their customers. The solid-state LED luminaires is a more cost-effective, energy-efficient, and a greater lumen-output choice.

Until recently, LEDs did not have the output necessary to match high-intensity discharge (HID) light sources such as high-pressure sodium or metal halide. However, today luminaires and luminaire housing advancements have improved LED performance.

Ample Advantages


LED luminaires provide virtually no maintenance, provide tremendous energy savings, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, replacing a 175-watt sodium vapor parking garage fixture with a linear LED luminaire provides a 44 percent energy savings. The solid-state reliability of LED lighting diminishes maintenance costs, especially in large installations. After 50,000+ hours, it is not surprising to find that LEDs still produce 70 percent of their original lumen output. Another advantage of LED luminaires over sodium vapor or metal-halide lighting sources, is that there is no “re-strike” after a power interruption, which improves safety.

If one LED fails, it does not produce a complete fixture outage. LEDs do not require any special equipment to deal with cold environments, and they tolerate high heat and humidity, which eliminates the need for specially designed circuitry.

Parking garage owners and facility managers want to provide a safe, secure environment while also trying to control skyrocketing energy costs should consider LED luminaires.