How to light up your car wash?
2021-06-30 15:27:34
As the cost of LED lights has declined, more and more carwashes have been incorporating them into their sites. LEDs not only prove more efficient and cost-effective in the long run, but they can also make a site “pop” out through a strategic use of lighting effects and color.
Today’s leading carwashes have figured out that there are five critical ways to use LEDs that resonate with customers: in signage, at entry/exit areas, for package confirmation, on equipment and in the vacuum area.
Let’s face it: The main way a carwash is going to pull in new customers is off the street. Therefore, you need to make yourself stand out, and incorporating LEDs into your signage is the way to go.
Entry/exit instructions
Dealing with automobiles carries an inherent risk, especially when they’re in the hands of customers who are not as familiar with your carwash as you are. There is always the chance that a customer will pull into or out of a bay or tunnel incorrectly, especially if it is unmanned. Even when tunnels, for instance, have greeters and loaders, many customers are distracted by cellphones or children in the car, heightening the risk of loading incorrectly and hurting someone or damaging equipment or structures.
However, LEDs can help minimize this risk.Safety can definitely be improved with [the] use of led lighting. Consumer safety can be enhanced by integration of color led lighting into wash cycles to help the customer understand when they need to stop, go or place a car in neutral.
While traditional red and green “traffic lights” and “stop/go” signs are perfectly valid ways to use LEDs to direct customers, there is another innovative way of using these colors that humans have come to associate with stopping and starting. This method is particularly useful for in-bay automatics (IBAs). Baright notes that as customers pull into the bay, you can have the bay illuminated bright green until the customer reaches the stop point, at which point the entire bay immediately turns red.
Another innovative way of using LED lights is for guiding vehicles into place. Consider the problems some customers have when positioning themselves properly in an IBA. Having lighting strips on the floor of the bay in lieu of regular guide rails is a way to help these “guidelines” stand out and keep customers in place. You can even have these guides change colors with the rest of the show you provide.
Wash package confirmation
As a business owner, you know receipts are important. You want to make sure you not only got what you paid for but that you paid the right amount. The receipt your customers get from your carwash is only going to tell them, at best, the level of wash purchased as well as the amount paid. But, aside from a quick look at the menu, how else can a customer be reassured that he or she purchased the desired services?
Nowadays, LEDs can function like a receipt for customers by helping them confirm what exactly they purchased. In addition, you can customize the light show for each package.
Equipment
Adding lighting to equipment to put on a show has become very popular in recent years — and for good reason. led lighting enhances the look of the product being applied and is highly effective in entertaining both adults and children, thus heightening the customer experience. Here are some ideas for how equipment can be lit for a show:
IBAs: Some systems come with light shows included, and they are available in both soft-touch and touchless formats.
Arches: Depending on the arch, you can use different colors to achieve different effects. For example, presoak arches can have green lights added to heighten the sense of a chemical bath. Rinse arches can have blue lights added for a waterfall effect. Additionally, foaming arches can have red or amber lights added for a lava or hot wax effect.
Dryers: If the dryer area is lit red, it creates the illusion of heat.
Brush wheels: LEDs can be mounted to moving wash brushes to catch customers’ attention.
Vacuums
Vacuums have always been critical at a carwash, so this equipment that takes up so much site space deserves the same lighting emphasis the rest of the site has. As vacuums have become more of a focal point with the rise of express exterior sites, lighting them properly has become a must.
Vacuum lighting requires light intensity bright enough to cast light into a car and with a wide distribution so that the front seat, back seat and trunk of cars have light For arch-style systems, there are LEDs that can be formed to match the bend radius of the arch. This not only creates an awesome visual appearance at dawn, dusk and nighttime hours, but it can also help illuminate inside the vehicles while customers are cleaning.The vacuum area is one of the most difficult areas, because you’re trying to light up the interior of the car, but the car’s roof is in the way. We recommend a combination of higher-mounted lights to provide area lighting coupled with some lower-wattage lights mounted at a lower height. The lower-wattage lights help send light to the inside of cars but aren’t too bright, so they don’t blind customers.it is also possible now to sync the lights on your vacuum stalls to illuminate the entire vacuum area in a specific color. For example, you can set the arches to alternate in slow fades between red and green for the holiday season.It also helps when you can keep your entire facility lit at all times.The efficiency of LED lighting also allows you to keep lights on longer; many operators are leaving them on 24/7. Remember, these lights are part of your marketing strategy, and the better you can make yourself a beacon, the more customers you will be able to attract.
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