500W LED Flood Light Replaces 2000W Metal Halide Flood Light - More Light & 73% Electricity Saving

Please click here if you would like to purchase the Lawn Bowls LED Flood Light used at Gracemere Lawn Bowls.

Bowling green showing installation of new 500W LED Flood Lights in place of old 2000W metal halides.

Bowling Green Lighting

The guidelines for lighting of night Lawn Bowls provided by Bowls Australia recommends that LED floodlights are located in positions that will provide the least glare to bowlers by placing the lighting away from normal lines of sight. It is recommended that a corner lighting system is used for outdoor greens.

The minimum recommended illumination for competition, recreation and training is 100 lux. The minimum recommended mounting height of the pole is 12m.

The design should comply with Australian Standard AS2560.2.8 Guide to sports lighting - Specific recommendations - Bowling greens and bowling clubs should refer to their local council / government for guidelines and permits.

Brief

Gracemere Bowling Club is a council owned facility just East of Rockhampton in Queensland. For some time the club had been struggling with poor lighting due to their four aging metal halides. The club wished to upgrade their aging metal halide bowling green lights to something more sustainable like LED flood lighting. However, due to being a club and council owned funds were heavily restricted so the upgrade would have to be conservative in terms of price but big in terms of light output. A budget but high quality solution was necessary.

The dimensions of the bowling green at Gracemere is approximately 40m square with an approximate 16m high light pole in each corner. Their current bowling green light levels were measured at between 23 and 60 lux across half of the the green with two of the metal halide lights currently blown leaving the other half of the green in almost complete darkness. 

Recommendation

Due the the clubs budgetary constraints we recommended the dual purpose LITE-SHL-HB-500W LED Flood Light which is a dual purpose outdoor or indoor high bay or flood light. It is a light weight, high output and more budget orientated LED flood light whilst still offering a high level of quality with respect to using Philips LUXEON LEDs and MeanWell HLG Series Drivers.

At up to 140lm/W or 70,100 lm for 120° beam angle the output of this 500W LED Flood Light is class leading. 

The Mean Well HLG Series Drivers alone are rated at 60,000 hours and backed by an independent 7 year manufacturer warranty. So you can expect the lighting system to potentially last a life time!

As mentioned advantage of the 500W LED Flood Light LITE-SHL-HB-500W is that it is the lightest flood light in its class with a weight of approximately 10kg. This makes it an excellent option for retrofits where structural considerations of the existing poles need to be taken into account.

For the 500W LED Flood Light model the lighter weight does limit maximum operating temperature to ~45°C for the standard model, but this is perfect for outdoor flood light usage where ambient temperatures are rarely above 35°C. For more extreme applications this LED Flood Light / Highbay comes with optional additional heat sinking and/or can be ran at 300W or 400W to increase the operating temperature limit to up to 60°C. Alternatively for high temperature areas and lighting applications you can consider our Edge Series High Temperature LED Flood Lights / High Bays which can be used in temperatures up to 80°C.

Results

The photo below shows the installation of the 500W LED Flood light LITE-SHL-HB-500W on the flood light tower. As you can see they could have easily installed 2 per tower but the single 500W LED flood light was sufficient to improve the lighting over their aging 2000W Metal Halides.

Here is the end result showing very even illumination across the bowling green using four of the LITE-SHL-HB-500W LED Flood Lights. Due to the relatively small area we used a medium 90° beam width to focus more of the light onto the court. This reduces the output of the light down to 126 lm/W or 60,800 lm but there is now more light where it is needed with the more focused projection system.

Whilst we were not able to achieve the minimum 100 lux with only four lights we were able to achieve ~80 lux which was reported as being an improvement over the previous lighting levels and the club members were happy with the results. You can see from the photos below we have achieved a reasonably high level of lighting quality with good uniformity that is more than sufficient for players to practice and compete in lawn Bowls.

Conclusion

In this case study our 500W LED Flood Light with 126 lm/W produced as much light or slightly more light than the old 2000W metal halides. Note that the metal halides will decay down to 50 to 60% of their original light output whereas after 40,000 hours the LED Flood Lights will still be up around 90% or more. A fresh 2000W metal halide flood light would most likley produce a little more light on the ground but not for long. The LED Flood Lights will potentially "last a life time". 

The other bonus was that we were able to reduce the club power consumption down from 8.8kw (including control gear) down to 2kw. This equates to a 77% saving in electricity meaning the electricity and maintenance savings will eventually pay for the new 500W LED Flood Lights.