Industrial Lighting: How to light a Warehouse (2024)

While choosing the correct lighting for your warehouse is key; it’s not rocket science.

It’s true that LED lighting is now cheaper than the fluorescent or halogen luminaires but it’s important not to buy the cheapest you can find as they’re guaranteed to have a high failure rate. You want to know that your lighting will work for 5 – 10 years easily without issue.

For warehouses, the recommended lux levels for manned storage areas, according to CIBSE / The Society of Light and Lighting, are a minimum of 150 lux at floor level and ideally 200 lux at the face of any racking. Typically we aim above these recommendations.

There are a fair amount of considerations to be made when choosing the correct type of lighting. The lighting plane, height of any racking, the spacing of any racking, ambient lighting and general usage of the area.

The above interactive illustration is by no means comprehensive; there are multiple factors to consider to ensure the lighting is adequate for the space’s use. Primarily it’s important to ensure its users are comfortable and are able to properly fulfill their tasks to their fullest ability and lighting can have a major impact. Keeping lighting to recommended levels also keeps you well protected when it comes to issues such as accidents as insurers will want to ensure that lighting levels were adequate for the jobs being performed it goes without saying that neglected lighting in a poor state of repair or simply not fit for purpose can be classed as negligence.

Whilst some may have differing opinions we believe this isn’t the most important consideration however it can have a drastic effect. To understand better we need to consider that LED is a direct lighting source rather than indirect lighting source. Indirect meaning that fluorescent, sodium or halogen lamps output light in a 360 degree fashion and use reflectors to direct the lighting out of the enclosure.

This means that LED lights can be better focussed in terms of light direction with the addition of lenses. The lenses can distribute the lighting in a wider or narrower fashion than compared to a naked fitting that simply has a diffuser. Given that lensed fittings are generally more expensive, the question really comes down to whether they are worth it? Unfortunately there’s no hard and fast rule and it very much depends on lighting placement. When lighting positions are confirmed digital lighting designs that estimate lighting output levels are often all you need to do to calculate whether the additional cost will be of benefit.

If for example your lighting doesn’t line up with your racking installation, narrow lensed LED lighting isn’t going to be a good option. You’d be better off using more powerful lighting with a wider distribution that should help alliviate shadowing from tall racking.

The recommendation for storage / racking areas is 150 lux. We aim for higher than that to alleviate issues that arise from aiming for that level such as shadowing and acceptable lux levels on the face of stored items. It is however quite common for large open spaces to be zoned with different areas that may include processes such as packing, production or just simple office space and in those scenarios the recommended lux levels do differ.

The CIBSE Society of Light and Lighting Code states many recommended lux levels for very specific applications and while this is publically available, it could be quite expensive to answer a few questions. Feel free to ask us if it isn’t listed below.