Lighting a pier on a sub-£1000 budget
As part of our work for Yarmouth Harbour on all things Yarmouth Pier, we were asked to put together a show to celebrate the pier and mark its re-opening. The Not-The-End-Of-The-Pier Show was born. A certain member of staff who shall remain nameless decided it would be a good idea to claim we could light up the pier as part of the show. We calculated we had around £1,000 to illuminate the 609ft long pier. A quick bit of online research turned up various projects to light piers. Saltburn Pier had been lit, but permanently. Cost? £380,000. hmm… New Brighton Pier came in for a more modest $50,000NZ. Nowhere I looked had a budget of less than £25K, even for temporary installations. Oh dear. The Island 2000 team kicked around various ideas, including illuminated balloons, which would have looked beautiful but gave us too many issues of reliability, safety and marine environmental risk. Out of this however was developed a simple, low cost idea. Post event we had enquiries from people wanting to replicate the idea, and I thought it might prove helpful to others looking to light large structures to blog details on how we did it.
We bought tiny LED packages designed to insert into balloons from Ebay and threaded them together with garden wire in groups of 3. Each group of 3 was then strapped to the enormous handrail with 4 long cable ties linked together at 4ft intervals (or 4 plank widths - it was the easiest way to measure, even if you look rather silly tiptoeing down the pier counting!). The local community helped light the pier, collecting a set of lights each from the bottom of the pier, then strapping them on where we had put out the cable ties. It was still light when we started, and we hadn’t tested the concept on the pier (only testing had been strapping LEDs on the back of my car one rainy night and running halfway down the street to check they were visible) so it was a nerve racking half hour as the sun set. As it got darker though it became clear that the effect was working. Once the lights were in place we deployed the last stage of our lighting, floodlighting the timber roundhouse at the end of the pier. We used a Ring PowerPack - a handy combination of heavy duty battery and inverter in one box, providing 300W of mains power to supply power to 4 low energy site lamps from screwfix.
The approximate cost breakdown was:
600 LEDs - £300
4 work lamps £160
Powerpack £100
Garden wire £3
Cable ties £50
Experimentation along the way £200
The end result was captured beautifully by Julian Winslow. Because of the angle of the shot (aimed at capturing the fireworks - not included in the budget!) you can’t see the lights close in to shore that well, but the ones at the end 600+ft away can be clearly seen. Click on the picture for a larger version.
As part of our work for Yarmouth Harbour on all things Yarmouth Pier, we were asked to put together a show to celebrate the pier and mark its re-opening. The Not-The-End-Of-The-Pier Show was born. A certain member of staff who shall remain nameless decided it would be a good idea to claim we could light up the pier as part of the show. We calculated we had around £1,000 to illuminate the 609ft long pier. A quick bit of online research turned up various projects to light piers. Saltburn Pier had been lit, but permanently. Cost? £380,000. hmm… New Brighton Pier came in for a more modest $50,000NZ. Nowhere I looked had a budget of less than £25K, even for temporary installations. Oh dear. The Island 2000 team kicked around various ideas, including illuminated balloons, which would have looked beautiful but gave us too many issues of reliability, safety and marine environmental risk. Out of this however was developed a simple, low cost idea. Post event we had enquiries from people wanting to replicate the idea, and I thought it might prove helpful to others looking to light large structures to blog details on how we did it.
We bought tiny LED packages designed to insert into balloons from Ebay and threaded them together with garden wire in groups of 3. Each group of 3 was then strapped to the enormous handrail with 4 long cable ties linked together at 4ft intervals (or 4 plank widths - it was the easiest way to measure, even if you look rather silly tiptoeing down the pier counting!). The local community helped light the pier, collecting a set of lights each from the bottom of the pier, then strapping them on where we had put out the cable ties. It was still light when we started, and we hadn’t tested the concept on the pier (only testing had been strapping LEDs on the back of my car one rainy night and running halfway down the street to check they were visible) so it was a nerve racking half hour as the sun set. As it got darker though it became clear that the effect was working. Once the lights were in place we deployed the last stage of our lighting, floodlighting the timber roundhouse at the end of the pier. We used a Ring PowerPack - a handy combination of heavy duty battery and inverter in one box, providing 300W of mains power to supply power to 4 low energy site lamps from screwfix.
The approximate cost breakdown was:
600 LEDs - £300
4 work lamps £160
Powerpack £100
Garden wire £3
Cable ties £50
Experimentation along the way £200
The end result was captured beautifully by Julian Winslow. Because of the angle of the shot (aimed at capturing the fireworks - not included in the budget!) you can’t see the lights close in to shore that well, but the ones at the end 600+ft away can be clearly seen. Click on the picture for a larger version.
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