Carport lighting.

Destination · 1 Oct 2017 at 13:09

At my folks house, they have a carport between the house and garage.
You can enter the house by the side of house door which attaches to the carport, and it is the most frequently used entrance to the house.
Currently it has a motion sensor covering the door/carport, and a light in the double height space between the house and garage.
The light is a fluorescent style bulb, one of the square types with a four pin attachment into the housing.
The bulb is on the blink.
Its a double height space, and not easy to get to, so I fancy instead of just changing the bulb, it might be best to update the lighting for the area.

The sensor is at a lower height, and seems to be part of an always on circuit, with the sensor deciding if power is supplied to the light or not.

Can I simply swap both sensor and light for two new lights each with built in sensors? One to illuminate sideways from the sensor area, and the other to flood light down?
I am thinking of going LED to maintenance is reduced. It'll take a piece of scaffolding to get up to the bulb/light housing, or the madness of a ladder on top of a low scaffold. So doing it once would be useful.

Anyone recommend potential replacement lights?

v dirteh! needs a clean

Mercenary Keyboard Warrior · 2 Oct 2017 at 09:14

If the sensor is controlling both lights your potentially going to need to change the wiring a little if you want them to be controlled independantly

There will be a "normal" set of wires going to the sensor which then switches the current to the light
Swapping the sensor for a light is easy as the wiring is normal, the second one will depend what wire is actually from the sensor to the light, its probably just normal 3 core and the live is being switched by the sensor unit, which means you can simply split the incoming to light one (was sensor) and use the 3 core to the light above.

There are loads of combo units as you say, or fit a dedicated sensor and two lights off it.
Does the light come on during the day if someone moves nearby? Often under porches etc lights don't avoid triggering when its light as they get too much of the daylight blocked

HardwareGeek · 2 Oct 2017 at 18:48

Would be easy to swap them both to led bulkheads with microwave sensor - but you make it sound pretty high up so need to make sure sensor would have the correct range for both especially the higher 1, microwave sensors are shorter range afaik 8m if i remember correctly, where as a PIR will be 12m+

If your using 2 lights with built in sensor then you can just replace the existing light like for like, and replace sensor with light but put perm live and switch live both into live terminal to give the 2nd light permanent live so it just works on its internal sensor

Might be best to just use standard bulkheads without sensor and Renew the PIR and make sure it is led compatible, you could alter the wiring to add a light behind the PIR aswell / move pir forward to avoid light interacting with pir etc

Should be able to do the above without needing to find / access the wiring / junction box in loft

If your willing to go to more trouble then you can do anything really

Could use a pic of the whole area really, but i would consider replacing pir with new led compatible PIR, possibly with greater angle like a 360 degree and replace the light with a 50/100w led flood ?

Destination · 3 Oct 2017 at 18:16

Will get further pics next weekend.

Any recommendation on specifics for the lights themselves?