1000 Watt Metal Halide LED Replacement

What Does it Take to Replace 1000 Watts Metal Halide with LED?

Before LED lighting became the powerhouse that it is today, metal halide lights were the most common form of commercial lighting.

The reason is that they can be purchased for a relatively cheap price and that they are extremely bright lights.

Nowadays, however, metal halide lights are at best outdated.

LED lighting provides a long-lasting, economical alternative that saves you money and minimizes energy usage. As the technology becomes more and more commonplace, LEDs are also becoming less expensive. Making the switch from metal halide to LED in your warehouse, factory, sports stadium, sports fields or parking lot may appear to be an intimidating task but in reality, and with the right help, it’s a smooth process.

Can You Replace a Metal Halide Bulb with LED Lights?

Yes, you can. A 400-watt metal halide bulb can be replaced with a 150-watt LED, while a 1000-watt bulb can be replaced with a 300-watt LED. Using LED bulbs instead of metal halide can lead to a 70%+ reduction in energy usage.

Fortunately, replacing metal halide with LED is simple.  The top two questions require a bit more of an explanation than just a simple, one-line answer.

In this blog article, we’ll tell you how you can replace your old metal halide lights with LED, how many lumens you need, and how to avoid the pitfalls many make when doing this conversion.

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Replacing 1000 Watt Metal Halide with LED

• High Bay Lighting: 1000W High Bay LED Replacement
• LED Stadium / Sports Field Lighting: 1000W Sports Light LED Replacements
• LED High Mast Lighting: 1000 Watt Equivalent LED High Mast Lights
• Flood Lighting: 1000 Watt Equivalent LED Flood Lights
• Shoebox Parking Lighting: 1000 Watt Equivalent LED Parking Lot Lights

What LED Wattage Replaces 1000 Watt Metal Halide?

It seems like a straightforward question, but the reality is that it’s a little more complicated than that. LEDs are designed for lower energy consumption, and as such, naturally have a lower wattage.

This means that a 300-Watt LED High Bay is much, much brighter than a 1000-Watt Metal Halide High Bay. Or you can replace a 1000-Watt Metal Halide Shoebox with a 300-Watt LED Shoebox.

Therefore, you cannot base your decision on watts. Instead, you need to focus on the number of lumens you need. Once you have that figured out, finding a replacement fixture is easy.

What LED is equivalent to a 1000-Watt HPS? 300-Watt LED lighting fixtures typically have an output close to that of a 1000 Watt HPS light. They can deliver light that lasts longer with lower consumption resulting in a lower energy bill. Maintenance costs will also be lower.

Four Things to Consider When Comparing A 1000 Watt Metal Halide Bulb to LED

1000w Metal Halide Lumens Loss

Even if you are using a brand new 1000-watt metal halide bulb, there is a second factor that contributes to lumen loss and that is the need to use a reflector to focus light. When light is created by an omnidirectional bulb, like a metal halide, it needs reflectors to gather, collect, and focus the light so it can be directed to where it’s needed.

If a light lumen does more than one bounce inside the reflector, it essentially loses its effectiveness. Reflector design is a science. The better it’s designed, the fewer lumens are lost inside the fixture. A metal halide bulb can lose up to 30% of its light in the reflected light bounce.

LED light is directional. It does not need reflectors. Sometimes LED lights incorporate optics to distribute the light in a specific pattern. This can also cause a lumen drop, but it’s nowhere near the lumen loss metal halide suffers from reflective bounce loss.

To put this in real numbers, a brand new 100,000-lumen Metal Halide Bulb may only be producing 70,000 actual lumens when installed in a fixture.

Make sure you understand the difference between metal halide bulb lumens and metal halide fixture lumens.

Quality of Light Beats Quantity of Light!

There are already plenty of things to consider when replacing metal halides with LEDs, and we’re about to give you one more. In addition to knowing that LEDs produce a more consistent shine without loss of lumens due to reflection, you should also know that LEDs produce a much higher quality of light. How do we know that?

To determine the quality of lumens, lighting engineers use something called the Color Rendering Index, or CRI. LEDs are available in a wide range of CRIs, starting at about 70 with an upper end of about 98. Metal Halide is not that bad, they are offered in a range from 60 to 90. LED and Metal Halide shine when compared to High-Pressure Sodium, which has a CRI of about 22. CRI matters. In essence, you need fewer lumens when you have higher quality.

Photopic vs Scotopic Lumens – and the Use of S/P Ratios

Photopic lumens are light detected by a light-measuring device, like a light meter or camera. Scotopic lumens are light detectable by the human eye.

Why is this relevant? Well, LEDs produce predominantly Scotopic lumens. It’s extremely rare for LEDs to produce any light in invisible spectrums, like UV or IR, unless LED Chips were added to create those spectrums. This is not the case with other types of lighting technologies, like metal halide.

In the lighting industry, S/P ratios were developed to try to level the lighting playing field. Let’s study 2 bulbs: a 1000-Watt High Pressure Sodium bulb that produces 100,000 lumens and High Bay LED Lights that produce 45,000 lumens. When you install both fixtures, the area under the LED light appears brighter. But how can that be? 100,000 is 2X + more lumens than 45,000. That’s where S/P ratios come in.

Using these same bulbs, scientists have assigned S/P Ratios to each bulb based on the quality of light they produce.

LED S/P ratio	2.0
High-Pressure Sodium S/P ratio	0.5

The scotopic lumens supplied by each of the light sources will then be the following:

LED scotopic lumens =	45,000 lumens x 2.0 =	90,000 lumens
HPS scotopic lumens =	100,000 lumens x 0.5 =	50,000 lumens

This is why LED appears brighter. Our eyes detect higher-quality light, and it appears brighter than low-quality light sources.

LED Lumens vs Metal Halide Lumens

Essentially, a lumen is a unit of light. It’s how we measure how bright light output is, and it’s how you’ll determine which LED light is the best 1000w metal halide LED replacement.

LED Lumens are very directional, and are a high-quality light source. Our customers have told us that the areas they replace Metal Halide lighting with LED are brighter, even though the metal halide bulbs appear to produce more lumens.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Many Lumens is 1000 Watts Metal Halide?

A 1000-Watt metal halide bulb has between 60,000 and 110,000 lumens output when it is brand new. This output will tend to decrease by 30% after about 5,000 hours of runtime.

You do not need to use 1000 Watts of LED to replace a 1000-Watt Metal Halide. Don’t focus on watts, focus on the lumens you need to meet your lighting requirements.

In the above example, the metal halide bulb is operating between 60 and 100 lumens per watt. How do we know this? It’s a simple calculation of dividing the lumens of the bulb by the watts consumed.

• A 1000-Watt Metal Halide bulb producing 100,000 lumens is operating at 100 lumens/watt. While these numbers are not horrible, you must remember that Metal Halide bulbs suffer from quick and immediate lumen degradation. 100 lumens per watt is the best they will ever do. Within 6 months of use, don’t be surprised to see a considerable lumen drop.
• From the instant you first flip the switch, the bulb becomes less and less bright. Considering metal halide half-life of around 7500 hours of use. That same metal halide bulb which was producing 100,000 lumens may now only be producing 50,000 lumens at its first half-life. Unfortunately, it still consumes 1000 watts and the energy draw is the same throughout the life of the bulb.
• At about 5,000 hours of run time, you’ll find that the 1000-Watt metal halide bulb has reached its L70 point. L70 defines the time it takes for a bulb to reach 70% of its initial lumen output. To give you some context, the L70 time of LED lights is anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 hours (depending on the chips used).

What LED Is Equivalent to a 1000W Metal Halide?

If you haven’t noticed by now, there isn’t an exact answer. Only a lighting plan can tell you exactly how much you need. Between higher CRI, lower energy consumption, and available color temperatures, replacing metal halide lights with LEDs can get a little bit complicated. But in our 12+ years of selling LED lighting, you can use this as a starting place:

• Indoors: 45,000 to 65,000 lumens (depending on the application and mounting height)
• Outdoors: 40,000 to 75,000 lumens (depending on the application and mounting height)

You’ll find that in some instances you can cut energy consumption by up to 75% when replacing a metal halide light. Most LEDs have an efficiency rating of about 130 – 200 lumens/watt.

New-generation LEDs tend to be more efficient than older chips. It’s a good indication of what you are buying – look at the efficiency of the LED fixture you are looking to buy.

What Is the 1000W Halogen Equivalent to in LED Watts / Lumens?

A 1000W halogen bulb produces around 15,000 to 20,000 lumens. It can be replaced with a 100-150 Watt LED fixture.

What Is the 1000W High Pressure Sodium Equivalent to in LED Watts / Lumens?

High Pressure Sodium does produce a lot of lumens, but they are very low quality. Therefore, it does not take a lot of LED lumens to outperform high-pressure sodium. Typically 300 Watts LED producing 45000 lumens is all you will need to outperform 1000 Watts HPS.

Can I Replace Metal Halide with LED?

Yes, you can replace metal halide bulbs with LED fixtures. You should be able to replace them one for one. LEDs are also more energy-efficient and have a longer lifespan.

How Long Does a 1000W Metal Halide Bulb Last?

A 1000W metal halide bulb typically lasts around 15,000-20,000 hours. At half-life, the bulb has already loss half of its effective lumens.

Is 2000 Lumens Twice as Bright as 1000?

Technically, 2000 lumens provide twice the light output of 1000 lumens. However, light quality plays a big part in this. 1000 lumens LED will appear to be brighter than 2000 lumens high-pressure sodium.

What Is the Lumen Output of a Metal Halide Lamp?

A metal halide lamp produces between 70 and 100 lumens per watt. A 1000W bulb will initially produce between 70,000 to 100,000 lumens. However, initial lumens will degrade quickly, usually within the first few months.