Installing flood lights for a small sans arena

blaggard

Hello,

I hope someone here can point me in the right direction

I am planning on installing some flood lights for a small sand arena that we have.
I have 2 posts at each end of the sand arena and on each i would like to place two 500w flood lights.

There is an out building that is wired for electricity and has an outside plug socket.
The outbuilding is about 10 metres away from the sand arena.

so my questions are as follows:

Is it possible/safe to have all 4 four floodlights wired via junction boxes to a single plug which would be connected to a single outdoor plug socket or should it be wired directly to the fuse box on a seperate trip switch?

What wiring should i use? I will definitely need to bury some of the wiring. The portion that runs from the outbuilding to the arena, what cable would I need for that?
Also i would then need to run some cable up the posts to the lights, what i should use there?
I have some 2.5mm dual core and earth cabling, but i suspect this wont do.

any advice or help you could give would be great.

thanks.

ART6

blaggard wrote: »

Hello,

I hope someone here can point me in the right direction

I am planning on installing some flood lights for a small sand arena that we have.
I have 2 posts at each end of the sand arena and on each i would like to place two 500w flood lights.

There is an out building that is wired for electricity and has an outside plug socket.
The outbuilding is about 10 metres away from the sand arena.

so my questions are as follows:

Is it possible/safe to have all 4 four floodlights wired via junction boxes to a single plug which would be connected to a single outdoor plug socket or should it be wired directly to the fuse box on a seperate trip switch?

What wiring should i use? I will definitely need to bury some of the wiring. The portion that runs from the outbuilding to the arena, what cable would I need for that?
Also i would then need to run some cable up the posts to the lights, what i should use there?
I have some 2.5mm dual core and earth cabling, but i suspect this wont do.

any advice or help you could give would be great.

thanks.

I think if I was doing it, I wouldn't try to connect 4 x 500 w lights to a single socket since the cable you'd need would be too big. The only way you could do it would be to wire all of the lights in series, and one bulb blowing could easily blow the fuse in a 13 amp plug. The lights will consume somewhere in the order of 9 amps, which is quite a lot. It's within the range of a 13 amp socket, but I would feel it too close to max for comfort. In any case, since the lights are outdoors and in your "sand" area, I assume used as a play area?, then I'd want to have them fed from an RCD in the main fuse box for safety. The two core & earth cable is OK for inside a house, behind a wall or under a floor etc, but not for use outdoors. It's not well enough insulated or protected, and the conductors can be exposed too easily. Personally I would use Steel Wire Armoured (SWA) and bury it, fixing it to the posts. The steel wire casing ensures that live conductors can't be exposed by damage.

This is my opinion though, not a description of how to do it, since there will no doubt be others out there who know better than I.

Alun

Maybe this would be better off in the Electrical sub-forum?

http://boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=1018

blaggard

Thanks so much for the great response.
I will definitely take your advice on the SWA cabling and RCD

Alun, how do i move this thread to the electrical forums, if possible?

Alun

blaggard wrote: »

Alun, how do i move this thread to the electrical forums, if possible?

PM a Mod, i.e. Delly or Karoma