Outdoor sports lighting

Maintenance and running costs

This section contains some simple guidance to help with your initial budgeting and business planning thinking.

A new outdoor lighting system is a major investment. Well designed and installed ones will meet your needs for many years to come. Like any investment it is important to protect it by budgeting for maintenance and running costs. It is also important to keep good records of all maintenance work undertaken for health and safety purposes.

A well designed external lighting installation will have hot-dipped galvanised floodlighting columns, which should last 25 years or more, floodlights designed to a high specification to protect them from the worst of the elements and cabling that meets all the relevant British and European standards

Over a 25 year period it costs around £95,000 to maintain a 350 LUX Hockey Pitch.

This includes servicing and testing, checking the lighting levels and lamp replacement. Assuming the floodlighting is used, on average, about 20 hours each week (around 1000 hours a year) then this works out at about £4 per hour,

The running cost per hour depends of how many floodlights there are, multiplied by the energy consumption of each lamp, and multiplied by the unit cost of electricity. So for a hocky pity, with an energy cost 25 pence per unit the running cost per hour would be:

20 floodlights X 2KW per lamp X 25 pence per KW/hr = £10 per hour.

However well the outdoor sports lighting is maintained it won’t last forever so it is necessary to put some money aside for replacement. Assuming they last 25 years then it is prudent to allow about £4 per hour for a replacement or sinking fund.

So, as a rule of thumb, the cost of the whole floodlit pitch for 1 hour is around £18 to cover the cost of electricity, maintenance and eventual replacement.

For a small multi-use games area this should be about £7 (£2 per hour for electricity, £2.50 for maintenance and £2.50 for replacement).