Sports and Club Lighting Projects, UAE

Sports lighting in the UAE

The number everyone asks for is the wrong one

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Almost every sports lighting enquiry starts with a lux figure, and almost every disappointing sports scheme met the figure it was asked for. An average tells you how much light landed on the surface in total. It tells you nothing about whether it landed evenly, and evenness is what players and animals actually respond to.

The useful measure is uniformity, the ratio between the darkest point on the playing surface and the average across it. A pitch lit to a high average with poor uniformity has bright bands and dark patches, and the dark patches are where a ball disappears, a take-off is misjudged or a foot goes down wrong. Getting uniformity right is a question of how many positions you light from and how they overlap, not how powerful each one is.

The second thing that separates a good scheme from a bad one is glare, and it has to be considered from two different eye heights. A spectator in a stand looks down at the surface. A participant looks along it, often while moving fast and often upward to follow a ball. A luminaire aimed to suit the first can be directly in the sightline of the second, which is why aiming on sports schemes is done from the field and not from the seating.

Then there is switching. Training does not need competition light levels, and running a full scheme for a Tuesday evening session is the most common avoidable cost in sports lighting. Splitting the installation into training, club and competition scenes at design stage costs almost nothing and saves running hours for the life of the facility.

Indoors the constraints change but do not get easier. Roof heights are lower, structures are reflective, and the fittings sit directly in the eyeline of anyone lying on a bench or looking up to follow play. Mounting between structure rather than below it is usually the answer, and matt dark soffits do more for glare than any optic.

Finally, the climate. Sand gets into optics through gaskets that pass a rain test, heat shortens rated life, and access equipment for a mast in a finished landscape is an expensive visit. Specifying lowering gear at the outset is the single decision that most affects whether a scheme is still performing in five years.

We work across all seven emirates from a showroom in Industrial Area 7, Sharjah, with sports and club work in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

The work

Clubs and facilities we have lit

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