Self storage facility lighting is even more important than you think.
Choosing the right lights and how to lay them out isn’t just about making it possible for your tenants to visit you at night—it’s also a powerful security and marketing tool.
There’s a lot that goes into choosing the right lighting for a self storage facility. From types of fixtures to lumens and local codes, let’s cover the considerations you need to make when looking at how to light up your storage facility!
The lighting you choose for a storage facility is an important part of your budget. It impacts not only your utilities but also your facility’s security and marketing.
If you’re building a new self storage facility, hopefully, you’ve chosen a contractor with experience in self storage. If so, they should be able to advise you on lighting.
But what happens when they give you options? What if you’re replacing lights at an existing facility or adding new lighting equipment? In these moments, you need to know what kind of lighting to choose. And to do so, you should have an idea of what your goal is.
Your choice matters.
Step 1: Consider your facility layout and what areas need to be lit
Step 2: Select your light fixtures and sizes
Step 3: Choose your lumens (or lux—more on that here)
Step 4: Decide on a color temperature
Step 5: Determine control methods and placement
Of course, building a storage facility is way more complicated, and even choosing the lighting isn't as easy as these steps make them seem.
The goal of these five easy steps is to help get you started in understanding the process of choosing lighting for your storage facility. There are many considerations to keep in mind!
The light fixtures you need for your storage facility will depend greatly on the layout of your storage facility. However, these five basic types of lights will generally cover your exterior lighting needs in some combination.
Floodlights are a great option for lighting large areas if you have the poles to mount them. Especially if you have open areas around the edges of your buildings, consider flood lights.
Wall light fixtures are a staple. Because of how outdoor storage units are typically laid out, mounting lighting fixtures on the walls or door jambs along your aisles can provide ample lighting.
In this scenario, make sure you choose the right fixture size to fit in the space you’re placing them. For example, if you place a wall fixture on the door jamb above a storage unit, make sure the fixture is smaller than the jamb and doesn’t hang out too far over the drive aisle to where it may be hit by a vehicle.
In some cases, shoebox or parking lot lights make sense. The most obvious place for these is your parking lot—especially if you have outdoor vehicle storage as an option—but they have their place in other scenarios as well, depending on your layout. They are a consideration if you have no wall space available but have or can place the proper pole for these lights.
Bay lighting and barn lighting aren’t ideal for exterior lighting, but they’re a great choice for adding lights to the inside of your storage units. This can be a major selling point, especially if tenants can access their units after dark.
These lights can also be useful for interior corridors or other interior spaces.
LED lights are currently the best choice for self storage operators.
There are other commonly-used lighting types. These include sodium, incandescent, and compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) lights. But LED lights are the ideal choice.
LED lights last longer (up to 100 times the lifespan of incandescent lights, for example) and are more cost-effective due to their energy savings. They can be up to 80% more energy efficient than other lighting types.
A self storage facility is going to have a lot of lights. And if you’re keeping the lights on all night, it’s especially important to consider your energy use and how that will impact your expenses.
Lumens are a measure of how much light is actually emitted from a bulb. Lux, the lesser-known but equally important cousin of lumens, is a measure of how much actual light is on a given surface.
If you intend to create the most secure and usable space even after dark, you should consider that you may want a higher lux across your site.
To put this into perspective, CIBSE—which publishes lighting standards—recommends upwards of 100-200 lux for aisles in distribution centers and warehouses but only 20 or so for parking areas.
If brightness is important, you can ask your contractors for guidance on choosing the right lights with the proper lumens and positioning to achieve the lux value you seek.
Aiming for something closer to daylight improves how bright the light feels and can impact the customer’s experience and perspective.
Kelvins are used to measure color temperature. Daylight is generally said to be around 4,500K to 6,500K. Something in this range is usually recommended for facilities such as self storage.
Choosing the right plan for placing your lights throughout your facility can help you create a better customer experience, improve security, and also save you money.
Haphazardly positioning your lights can lead to you purchasing more lights than you need. An expert can help you choose how to get the best coverage without unnecessary light fixtures.
One example is the lighting for a drive aisle between outdoor drive-up storage units. By alternating the lights on each side of the drive aisle and taking into account the angle of the beam, you can light an entire drive aisle.
If you are careful and smart about placing your lights, you can potentially use half the lighting fixtures compared to alternative placements.
Pug Pro Tip: Consult an engineer or other expert with self storage building experience when planning your lighting layout. There are many considerations between energy usage, wiring, and adequate lighting, and they are best positioned to help you succeed.
If you’re building a storage facility, you should know that playing nice with the city or county is important.
Lighting is a significant concern for many municipalities. Light pollution is a growing conversation point across the country. And the closer you are to residential areas, the less people want your facility to be lit up like the sun in the middle of the night.
After all, few people want to have the facility across the street shining that kind of light on their window in the middle of the night.
Depending on where you’re building your storage facility, you may need to pay attention to Dark Sky Compliance guidelines. You may also need to implement motion sensing for your lighting instead of having always-on lights.
This will vary depending on where you are, and you should follow up with an expert if you’re unsure where to find this information. Your contractors should know, but it always helps to be informed yourself.
A well-lit facility is less likely to be a target of break-ins or other criminal activities compared to facilities with poor lighting.
Some experts even believe that lighting is a stronger deterrent than gates and fences.
These days, there are many easy-to-transport tools to help a criminal cut through a fence and get into a storage unit. The common knowledge among storage operators is that if they want to get in, they’ll get in. Lighting deters these activities because criminals know they’re more likely to be spotted when the facility is brightly lit.
Ample lighting not only helps deter break-ins, but it also means your security cameras have a better chance of catching evidence if criminals do decide to target your self storage facility.
Lighting can be used in your storage facility’s marketing to help you secure rentals, too!
Most customers are more likely to rent if they believe the self storage facility is secure. Half of security is basically the perception of being secure, and lighting goes a long way toward both actual security and the perception of security.
So, what’s the best way to show off your storage facility’s lighting?
Your self storage website and your Google Business Profile.
Uploading photos of your facility lit up at night is a great way to show off to your customers. Those pictures do more than words to express how safe the facility appears, even in the dead of night.
After all, photos are incredibly important for your storage website.
Adding photos to your Google Business Profile means that users don't even need to make it to your website to see how great your facility looks—even at night. Not only that, but regularly uploading photos to your Google Business Profile is a great way to approach local SEO and make Google more likely to rank you higher in local 3-pack results!
Marketing your self storage facility lighting is almost as important as having the right lighting. Once you choose lighting for your self storage facility, make sure you show it off to get the most out of your investment and turn it into rentals!
Want to learn more about running a self storage facility and the state of the industry? Here are some of my other favorite posts!
At StoragePug, we build self storage websites that make it easy for new customers to find you and easy for them to rent from you.
