If you are wondering how many lumens are required to light a tennis court, this article is written for you; as we are going to share with you some basic knowledge about lumens, as well as how to select the right number of lighting fixtures for a tennis court.
What is lumen?
Lumen is basically a unit of luminous flux (lm), which measure how much light is emitter from the flood lights. The general idea is that the higher the lumen, the brighter the lights.
Factors affecting the tennis court lighting lumens needed
Although tennis court has a standard size, the lumen needed varies with different factors such as level of competition, pole height, number of light poles, ceiling height and more. Let’s discuss the following.
1. Level of competition – Classes I, II & III
The basic rule is that we need brighter (higher lumens) lights for higher tennis competition level. In accordance with the ITF tennis court lighting standard, we need 500lux for class I outdoor tennis court, 300lux for class II and 200lux for class III. Class I is designed for national or international matches, class II is for tennis club or college, and class III is for residential or recreational tennis court. Now the question becomes –
How many lumens do I need to light a tennis court?
For a tennis court that is designed for professional matches, we need around 300,000 to 400,000 lumens. These lumens are capable to generate 500lux over the class I tennis court. How to calculate the lumen actually? As the tennis court size (in square meter) is around 600m2, the minimum lumen required = 600m2 x 500lux = 300,000 lumens. However, this is just the theoretical value as there is light loss and spill light in reality, so we need to mark up around 10% to 20% to compensate the loss.
Similarly, for class II tennis court, the minimum lumens needed to light up the whole tennis court is 600m2 x 300lux = 180,000 lumens.
For class III, the lumen required = 600m2 x 200 lux = 120,000 lumens.
Hence, we can see we need more lumens to light up the tournament or professional tennis court, and less lumens for residential or backyard tennis court.
How many lights do I need to light a tennis court?
Assuming we need around 300,000 lumens for a professional tennis court, how many lighting fixtures do I need? In fact, this is predominately affected by the number of poles. The typical outdoor tennis court lighting layout has 4 poles or 6 poles, and each pole haves 2 lamps. So, we need 8 lights for 4-pole layout, and 12 lights for 6-pole layout.
For 4-pole layout, we will need 300,000 lumens / 8 lights = 37,500 lumens per lights, which is equivalent to 250W per LED light. Thus, we need 8 pcs of 250W LED lights for a 4-pole tennis court.
For 6-pole layout, we will need 300,000 lumens / 12 lights = 25,000 lumen per lights, which is equivalent to 150W per LED light. So, we need 12 pcs of 150W LED lights for a 6-pole tennis court.
If the above example can’t solve your issue, please feel free to drop us a message as we offer free tennis court & other sport lighting consultation service.
2. Pole height (for outdoor tennis court)
Do you know pole height also affect lumen needed to light a outdoor tennis court? If the pole is too tall, we will need to increase the lumen a little, says from 300,000 lumens to 330,000 lumens in order to compensate the light loss. When the light beams travel in the air, attenuation and scattering would occur. If the outdoor environment is dusty, you may observe the light escapes the tennis court.
However, it is just a preliminary estimation. If we need to have a precise lighting plan, we will need to utilize a lighting software called DIALux to simulate the photometric outcome of the flood lights. Sport Light Supply is one of the few companies providing free DIALux service.
3. Number of pole (for outdoor tennis court)
We need to adjust the required total tennis court lighting lumens according to the number of poles. This is because the smaller the number of poles, the longer the travel distance of the light beam, and therefore the greater the attenuation of the beam.
When we compare 4-pole and 6-pole layouts, each pole would be responsible for a larger area in the 4-pole tennis court.
4. Ceiling height (for indoor tennis court)
How about indoor tennis court? Similarly, if the ceiling is too high, says over 10-15 meters, we will need to add approx. 15% to 30% lumens to the tennis court lighting.
To conclude, we can see there are so many factors affecting the tennis court lighting lumen, says the level of competition, lamp height and so on. Fortunately, we can accurately estimate how many lumens needed by making use of lighting software. If any assistance is needed, please feel free to contact us, we are eager to help.
