When designing landscape lighting, you may choose several different types of lights to achieve the overall lighting effect you want. This often involves a combination of wall washes, spotlights, floodlights, and streetlights that can enhance the visual appeal of your yard, highlight specific features, improve safety, and direct traffic.
Spot and flood lights are the most common choices; however, understanding the differences between them and determining which is best for different lighting needs can be difficult. To complicate matters further, one manufacturer's spotlight may be considered a floodlight by another. Therefore, it is important to understand the concept of beam angle and to know which beam angle you need to determine the lighting effect you typically want, which will help you to ensure that you choose the right outdoor light for your project.
1. Outdoor Flood Lighting: What are Spotlights?
Spotlights typically provide a beam angle of no more than 45 degrees, or even less than 25 degrees. This is the type of light you often see above a garage door, or like a light that shines upward to highlight a specific landscape feature.
Spotlights are often used to illuminate specific objects, such as statues, doorways, interesting trees, or architectural features in your home. If you want to limit the light to a specific area (such as a small seating area), you need to use spotlights without allowing the light to reach your neighbor's windows or cause light pollution.
Spotlights are also often used when landscape lighting design uses both light and shadow to create visual interest. Because they make it easier to direct light exactly where you want it, spotlights are perfect for this type of design and allow your installer to create the agreed-upon look more precisely.
2. Outdoor Flood Lighting: What are Floodlights?
Floodlights have a wider beam angle than spotlights and are often used when a wider range of lighting is needed. For example, you wouldn't use a floodlight to highlight your favorite landscape feature, but you would use a floodlight to illuminate a parking lot or a large deck or patio.
Floodlights often have a beam angle of more than 45 degrees or even up to about 120 degrees; however, some lights labeled as floodlights may have a beam spread as narrow as 25 degrees. With this in mind, if you're looking for a floodlight with a narrow beam angle, you're better off looking at a spotlight.
In addition to illuminating your driveway, guest parking area, or outdoor living space, floodlights are perfect for creating the look of moonlight bathing your garden, lawn, or patio using downlights mounted on trees or structures.
If you find it difficult to remember the difference between spot and floodlighting, keep this in mind: spotlighting illuminates a specific place, while flood lighting illuminates an area. This may come in handy when it comes to landscape lighting design.
3. The difference between floodlights and spotlights
3.1 Form of illumination
Floodlight is highly diffuse. It throws light in all directions, illuminating the entire scene within the range of illumination. Spotlights, however, have a focused effect and can therefore be directed more precisely. When turned on, a qualified spotlight can focus on specific objects and eliminate glare.
3.2 Beam angle
Beam Angle, also known as beam pattern, is the main difference between a floodlight and a spotlight. It is the width of the light emission or distribution. In other words, it is the Angle formed between the relative points of the beam axis, where the intensity drops to 50% of the maximum intensity. The spotlight beam Angle is narrow, the width is generally less than 45 degrees. Floodlights provide wider beam angles greater than 45 degrees and up to about 120 degrees.
But knowing the beam Angle alone is not always beneficial, knowing the beam width in feet from a given distance will be more helpful in selection. There's a formula that can help.
Beam Angle x 0.018x Distance from bulb = beam width
For example, if you have a 120-degree floodlight 10 feet from the bulb, you can know the beam width by the following calculation:
120 degrees x 0.018 x 10 feet = 21.6 feet wide
Or, if your spotlight has a beam angle of 40 degrees and is 20 feet from the bulb, the beam width is 14.4 feet. Here is how to calculate the beam width:
40 degrees x 0.018 x 20 feet = 14.4 feet wide
4. Conclusion
In order to meet the different needs of customers, RELYARD designs floodlights with a variety of beam angles, 25°, 30°, 45°, 60°, 90°, 120° or polarized lenses, although RELYARD calls the floodlight a floodlight when the beam angle is 25°, 30° or 45°, from the definition of the spotlight, it should be classified as a spotlight rather than a floodlight, and when the beam angle is 60°, 90 When the beam angle is 60°, 90°, 120° or polarized lens, it is considered a real floodlight. This is not to mislead customers, but to achieve different lighting effects through a lamp to meet different customer requirements.
A typical case, soccer field lighting, the general standard soccer field size is 105x68m, 4 poles or 6 poles, and the height of the pole is generally 18-20m, in order to achieve the standard pitch uniformity of 0.6 requirements, each pole on the light will choose a different beam angle, irradiation distance is far, will choose a small angle beam angle, this time should be considered spotlight, and when the light irradiation distance is close, we will choose floodlights, only with this, the uniformity of illumination throughout the stadium can reach the standard.