Managing the facilities on an estate can include many responsibilities – with increasing safety and reducing risks being right at the top of the list.
Outdoor lighting provides so many benefits to make estates secure, enjoyable and relaxing places to live, such as:
- Making it easy for residents to park.
- Ensuring walkways are well lit.
- Preventing thefts and criminal activity.
- Avoiding accidents.
Even a drop curb or uneven part of the flooring can cause a severe trip hazard – think about people with buggies, wheelchairs, mobility aids or carrying something that may obscure their vision.
Outdoor solar lighting is an excellent precaution and increases the confidence of residents and visitors that their estate is maintained in pristine condition.
Let’s run through some of the risks inherent with estate management and why lighting can be a powerful way to demonstrate due diligence and care for resident’s safety.
Risk Assessing a Residential Estate
While risk assessments aren’t always the most exciting part of the job, they are crucial to support estate managers in evaluating potential risks.
Here’s an example of a typical estate risk assessment:
- Observation: the pedestrian walkway between the road and property C is narrow, with a water feature on one side.
- Risk: pedestrians walking at night may miss the edge of the pavement and could be at risk of infringing on traffic routes, causing accidents or injury. A pedestrian, particularly a child, could stumble and fall into the water, causing a risk of drowning.
- Solution: install adequate lighting to ensure the walkway is well lit and easy to navigate. You could also consider barriers on either side.
- Outcome: the risk is mitigated.
It’s always essential that a risk assessment be tailored to the situation. In this theoretical example, let’s say the walkway has been at the exact location for many years, and there have never been any incidents or concerns raised.
In that case, it’s unlikely that you need to make a significant investment in expanding the size of the pedestrian route or erecting barriers (which may also pose a risk of tripping or could impact the aesthetic of the estate).
Instead, a simple lighting installation ensures that all road users can see the two paths with ease, whether in a vehicle or on foot, even when the weather is poor or when travelling at night.
Why is risk assessment critical?
It covers even large estates systematically, helping you spot potential problems, prioritise the most vital, and make fast decisions about the most appropriate solutions.
Preventing Risk Through Outdoor Estate Lighting
We’ve looked at one scenario, but estate lighting is a great solution that can reduce or remove a massive range of potential accident risks.
Lighting is essential for estates with any traffic systems, but also because in the winter, there’s a greater chance that people will naturally be walking, moving around or travelling to and from their homes in low-light conditions. Bad weather also impacts our visibility, so heavy rain, dark clouds, fog and mist can all make it tricky to see where we’re going and navigate safely.
Outdoor estate lighting helps prevent:
- Falls, trips, stumbles and slips.
- Traffic incidents and scrapes.
- Property or landscaping damage caused by parking errors.
- Criminal activity – whether targeting properties or as general activity in the nearby vicinity.
- Difficulties for emergency services locating an address.
Estate lighting also makes the area more enjoyable. Delivery people can find locations with ease. Families can use outdoor spaces and play areas, and residents are comfortable walking and exercising, with well-lit paths and communal spaces.
Why Estate Managers need to be Risk Aware
In a world where it is easier than ever to place blame for an accident, it’s always wise to be cautious about the risk potential. Even where there is no particular fault, an estate manager might be considered responsible for an incident that they could have prevented.
While the vast majority of the time, such an issue might not progress to legal proceedings, it is a possibility that estate managers must be conscious of.
Likewise, having outstanding estate lighting can provide other benefits:
- Making the area more appealing, more inviting and thus more desirable.
- Enhancing the wellbeing of residents and visitors.
- Encouraging better enjoyment of facilities and green areas.
- Improving ease of navigation.
- Deterring criminals and making the estate a more secure place.
Estate lighting may be a simple solution – but provides compelling benefits to the advantage of everybody involved.
What is the Best Estate Lighting for Risk Prevention?
So, we’ve run through the value of risk assessment, why it’s vital for estate managers, and the kind of hazards that professional quality lighting can swiftly resolve. However, choosing the right estate lighting is another subject!
The lighting you choose needs to be:
- Affordable – including maintenance costs and parts replacements.
- Manageable – with easy to use functionality.
- Reliable – working seamlessly in all weather.
- Cost-effective – with benefits matching the outlay required to run the estate lighting.
Solight specialises in estate lighting. We provide high-performance solar products that offer enormous advantages in terms of cost, durability, and performance.
Your estate lighting needs to be fit for purpose. Opting for commercial-grade battery systems and automatic recharging is an ideal way to have absolute confidence that your lighting will remain in faultless operation, 365 days a year.
Solight Solar Estate Lighting Solutions
Some of our most popular estate lighting products include:
This superb estate lighting system provides the ultimate illuminations for guaranteed performance and expansive floodlighting, ideal for high-traffic areas.
With over 1,500 cycles of power provided through the premium lithium-ion battery, the Atlas street lights can run for over 12 years without a single replacement part required.
Next, our Halo landscape lights are a modern and minimalist design, with smooth curved edges to bring style to your estate security systems.
Incorporating the same long-lasting battery, estate managers can erect these pole-mounted landscape lights unobtrusively, providing gentle yet steady lighting for any spaces.
- Solar Courtyard Light – Courtyard
The Solight Courtyard light is a discreet and intelligent security lighting option, with no less than 32 lighting modes and a quality PIR sensor for automatic activation when movement is detected.
At a mounted height of between three and six metres, the Courtyard solar light is ideal for estates where you require remote management of your lighting systems and includes our renowned IP65 waterproof rating.
Finally, the Camps Bay Solar Street Light is an excellent choice for estates where you need a discreet lighting solution, with a subtle casing design, yet ALS technology that provides up to ten days of continual light, with a single solar battery charge.
Step-down technology enables the light to automatically adjust its output in poor weather, conserving the length of each cycle and providing outstanding value for money.
Each of these solutions provides a solar lighting installation that can prevent many risks and is fast, easy, and effortless to install and manage. If you’d like professional guidance on estate lighting to prevent your key risks, please contact the Solight team.
