Any advice on indoor arena lighting? Where did you buy it? What kind did you get? Thanks!
We have T-8 I think.
The electrician bought them and it was cheaper thru his business than I could have found them.
Arena lights are graded by the lumens and how high they will be hung.
That will determine the cone of light they will provide below.
To do it right, you may be surprised how many it takes.
It is expensive to light an arena, but worth it as you get to use your arena so many more hours.
Learn from my Fail:
Do NOT get cold-ballast fluorescent fixtures unless they are enclosed.
I got mine because I hated the wait time to On & the subtle buzzing from halide.
LED was not an option 15yrs ago - or at least not suggested by my electrician.
I sadly underestimated the amount of dust that would accumulate & the damp that would cause the ballasts to go bad.
As a result I now have a single fixture of 4 in the barn that reliably goes on, another that takes its sweet time & 2 that need deep cleaning & probably replacement of ballasts.
I have 3 rows of 5 fixtures in my indoor, but rarely bother to use them as I generally don’t ride after dusk.
If I do turn them on, I never need more than perhaps the center row or the 2 sides.
Here is an old thread that may help:
Bluey’s link is about barn lighting, not arena lighting. A search should turn up several threads. I’ll repeat myself though. My indoor is 60x140 and I have 2 lines of 4 (6-bulb) fixtures, I think T8 bulbs. I should have gotten 5 fixtures in each line, the ends are a little shadowy but not bad. I wanted to avoid others’ experiences of having an arena that you could perform surgery in; I’m not a fan of super bright lighting. My fixtures are not enclosed and they are doing well since 2016. Sometimes the sprinkler hits them, I could probably do it on purpose every other year to keep them clean…
I researched my own lighting because the numbers I got from the local electricians were huge. I got fully enclosed LED fixtures from PRO lighting. American made, and I saved a ton of money. They are so bright I ended up putting up fewer fixtures than I planned, and almost NEVER use all three banks.
We are replacing our Metal Halide bulbs with LED corn bulbs. You have to take the fixture down, bypass the ballast, but it was a cheaper replacement then the entire fixture.
