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• Q: How many flood lights will I need to light up my house / garage / fence / porch / other?
  • A: There are a number of factors that affect the number of floods required for your display. If you are note sure how many flood lights would be required, start with one and perform testing against your specific structure.
    • Reflectivity of surface - If you are reflecting the light off of a surface (as opposed to directly pointing them at your audience as "blinders"), this will have the greatest affect on the floods usability and output. Examples of surfaces that reflect poorly are - dark brick, dark painted surfaces, roofing, trees, dark stucco or any other dark surface. When illuminating a dark surface, additional flood lights will be required. Consider placing your floods in front of windows with white blinds or against props or structures that are lighter in color.
    • Height and width of area - These floods output at an angle of about 120 degrees, as such, the area they will cover varies depending on the distance from the area being lit. So, placing them 10ft away from a wall will cover a larger area but at a lower level of light compared to a flood only 5ft away from a wall. If this area is highly reflective (white), this may not be an issue but if the area is dark, you may need to move the flood in closer and add additional floods for full coverage. Also consider where you are placing the flood - if you are attempting to illuminate the underside of a second story soffit, you would be better to place the floods in an elevated position closer to the second story, such as on a lower roof.
    • Structure / house design - it is always easiest to illuminate a smooth, flat surface. Given that most houses have elements that prevent this, such as columns, curves, porches, windows, protrusions and other design elements that break up the dispersion of light, often more than one or many floods are required to archive a smooth and even coverage over the entire area being illuminated. As a side benefit of using a number of floods is that you can now control each one individually, allowing more complex sweeps or chases over the face of the structure.
• Q: Should I use a "High Output" flood or a lower level output flood?
  • A: There are a number of factors that determine if would be better to use a High Output flood or a simpler, lower level output flood:
    • High output lights usually cost about $100-350+ per flood due to their need to more complex housings due to heat dissipation issues (higher output LED based floods are less efficient.)
    • High output lights are great where you need a huge amount of light in a focused area, such as up lighting a tree. Where this can be an issue is when they are used on houses or other large objects. When you light up a house, you want smooth even color over the entire face of the house. Since most houses are not completely flat, that means that you'll have columns, gables, soffits, porches, etc that need lighting directly on them to ensure that there are no dead spots or shadows. This is accomplished just like the theater does it - with a range of overlapping lights. That then means you need lots of them, say, 4-10 floods, not just one or two. To test this on your home, get a large flash light and stand in your yard where you want to place the flood light(s). Then look for how well the coverage is, how far back you need to be to get the area of coverage and if there are dead spots.
    • The more floods you have, the more sequencing options you have. If you have 4, 6 or 8 floods over the face of a house, you can easily chase or "roll" colors over the face of the house. When you have one or two high powered floods, the effect is greatly diminished.