When building or remodeling the tennis court, lighting is one of the must-have components. However, have you ever wondered how much does the tennis court light cost? What are the expenses associated with retrofit tennis court flood lighting? And how much do we need to spend on running the pole lighting? If you have the above questions, this article is designed for you. After reading this page, you can understand the cost of tennis court lighting.
In general, the average lighting cost for a tennis court is $1,200-$2,500. This price is talking about the common 4-pole or 6-pole lighting layout for a residential tennis court. If your tennis court is designed for commercial or competition purpose, the lamp cost will be much higher. If you are installing the tennis stadium lighting, the cost can be $10,000 to $40,000, or even $100,000 for the international tournaments such as ATP, US Open or Wimbledon.
After buying the flood lights, it is not the end of the story, as we also need to take the installation cost in consideration. If you don’t want to install the tennis court lighting by yourself, we will need to hire the lighting contractors. The price varies as some contractor or electrician may charge you $50 to $200 per hours, or charge you $100 to $300 per tennis court lights. The overall tennis court lighting installation cost depends on the number of lamp installation, number of pole and the height of pole. It should give you a brief idea.
After all the hard work, you are now having the tennis court with bright lighting. The next consideration is the running cost. If you are using LED flood light in the residential tennis court, the running cost will be $0.2-$0.8 per hour, or approx. $1 per day if you operating the lamp for 3 to 5 hours per day. Isn’t it cheap enough?
Factor affecting the tennis court flood lights cost
As mentioned earlier, the average tennis court lighting cost is ranged from $1,200 to $2,500. Why is there such a wide range? This is because the lighting fixtures price depends on various factors, say type of lights, brightness required and more.
1. Types of lighting (LED vs metal halide vs HPS flood lights)
The total lighting cost of tennis court can be vastly different among LED metal halide and HPS. Generally speaking, metal halide and HPS is cheaper than LED. The price of metal halide is around $20-$40 per 100 watts, HPS is around $5-$10 per 100 watts, while LED is $60-$100 per 100 watts.
We can see LED is more expensive than MH and HPS, why do people still use LED to retrofit the tennis court lights?
In fact, we can’t only just look at the cost per watts; instead, we should take a look at the lumens output, which is associated with the brightness of the lamp. Believe it or not, 100W HPS brightness is equivalent to 10W LED! Thus, if your tennis court is using 2000W HPS lamps, you will need only 200W LED to replace it! It means your future electricity running cost can be reduced to 1/10, plus you don’t need to maintenance the lamps so frequently as LED lasts for at least 50,000 hours. Because of the above benefits, many people are retrofitting the tennis court lighting to LED flood lights nowadays.
2. Brightness required for tennis court
The general idea is that the level of tennis competition increases with the flood light cost.
For residential or recreational tennis court, the brightness requirement is around 200 lux (class III), the flood light cost can be $1,200-$2,000.
For tennis club or commercial venues, the brightness needed is approx. 300 to 400 lux (class II), so the cost of tennis court lighting becomes $1,800-$3,000. This is because we need the sports luminaires with higher power and lumen output.
For professional tennis court, we will need to spend around >$3,000 on flood lighting fixture to give >500lux (class I). When it comes to the tennis stadium, there is a wide range of lighting cost because we will need unique lighting design for different stadium and light pole layout. If you want to get the free lighting design from us, please don’t hesitate to drop us a message.
Installation cost of tennis court lighting (retrofit or new installation)
After purchasing the flood lights, we will need to hire the contractors or electricians to install them on the tennis court light poles. Generally speaking, you can select between hourly rate or piece rate. Depending on type of installation, we can select different method to save money.
Retrofit tennis court lighting cost
1. How to save money when retrofitting the tennis court lighting?
Hourly-rate contractor is a better choice. This is because it involves the simpler bulb (or flood light) replacement, so the lighting retrofit can usually be done within a short period of time. A good electrician should be able to install one flood light within half an hour to one hour, which costs around $25-$100 per lamp. If we need to install 8 flood light in the tennis court, the installation cost would be approx. $200-800. Sometimes the cost increases with pole height because they need more safety precautions when mounting the tennis court lights.
2. New installation
On the contrary, if we install the new light pole and flood lights, it is suggested to select piece rate. This is because the new installation of flood lights involves many complex tasks, so it is relatively time-consuming. Thus, to save time and budget, we can hire a team of electricians, as we can come up with the total cost of tennis court lighting installation.
Moreover, some researches also show that paying the piece rate can lead to higher productivity because the workers don’t need to extend the time of installation to earn more.
How much does tennis court lighting cost to run?
After new installation or retrofit of LED lighting, it is time to enjoy the tennis play at night! We may wish to know the running cost of the tennis court flood lights. Fortunately, if you are using LED lights, you don’t need to worry about electric bill as LED is an energy-saving light source among metal halide, HPS and mercury vapor lamps.
How to calculate the running cost of tennis court lighting? Assuming that we are using 8 x 300W LED flood lights, which is typical lighting layout, the running cost equals to 8 x 300W x $0.12 / 1000 = $0.288 per hour. If we turn the flood lights on for 6 hours per night, the cost would be $1.73 daily, and $51.8 monthly. The running cost would be more sensitive to tennis clubs because they usually have more than one tennis court. In fact, using LED lights can reduce the electric bill in long run, despite the LED lamp price is higher than metal halide or halogen bulbs at the beginning.
How about the non-LED lights? Take the halogen bulb as an example. Since the lighting efficiency of halogen bulb is 10x lower than LED, we will need 10x power consumption of halogen bulb to produce the same brightness; thus, the tennis court light running expense = $2.88 hourly, $17.3 daily and $518 monthly. We can save tons of electricity cost if we replace the halogen bulbs by LED in the tennis court.
Running cost comparison
Then, we can take a look at how much tennis court lighting running cost can we save per year. The total yearly running cost is $631 for LED and $6310 for halogen lights. The difference between them is $5679, which is able to cover the lamp cost and the installation cost after one year. Do you think is it worthwhile to buy and replace the conventional lighting?
If you would like to get more info about tennis court lighting and cost analysis, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We offer free lighting design service.
