Flood Light Specifications I Actually Check Before Signing a Wholesale Contract

The 60-second version

If you have a meeting in ten minutes and just need the short answer: here are four things I check before a flood light supplier gets anywhere near our approved vendor list, and where most of them try to blur the spec sheet.

1. LM-79 and LM-80 reports — ask for the actual PDFs, not a claim of "20,000 hours."
2. IP rating of at least IP65 for outdoor use — and IP66 or IP67 if the install is coastal or flood-prone.
3. Solar panel and battery specs listed separately and matched to the minimum-sunlight scenario, not just the summer one.
4. Warranty — I don't care about the number of years. I care about what happens the day something fails.

That's the whole framework. Everything below is why I landed on it, and where it breaks.

Why I became this picky (2022, three buildings)

In 2022, our company had three office buildings spread over roughly eleven acres. The parking lot and loading dock floods were aging out, and rewiring the whole site was quoted somewhere in the low six figures. So I started looking seriously at solar outdoor lighting. My thinking at the time was simple: no trenching, no electrician scheduling, no utility paperwork. What could go wrong?

I found a supplier. Their quote came in about 18% under our usual distributor. The rep said the factory was "direct," that LM-79 testing was "in progress," and they could send a proper invoice — which mattered to me because in early 2020 I once accepted a handwritten receipt from a cheaper vendor, finance rejected the expense, and I ate $2,400 out of my department budget. I still remember that number.

The units arrived. They looked fine. Six months later, the flood lights on the north side of the parking lot started dimming out by 4 PM whenever we had two cloudy days in a row. Not broken — just undercharged. The supplier called it "atypical weather." Their own spec sheet, when I finally found the number buried in a sub-page, rated the system for five hours at minimum sunlight. Five. We needed eleven.

Everyone told me to always verify the low-light operating window before approving an outdoor lighting quote. I only believed it after skipping that step once and having to re-run the whole procurement cycle.

What I actually look for on a spec sheet now

1. LM-79 and LM-80 — not negotiable

LM-79 measures the fixture: lumens, wattage, color temperature, CRI. LM-80 measures how the LED chip degrades over time. The first one tells you what you're buying on day one. The second one tells you what you still have in year three. Without the LM-80, a "rated life" number is essentially marketing copy.

When a supplier sends both PDFs without hesitation, that tells me more than the reports themselves. When they send one, or send a certificate of compliance without the underlying test data, I usually move on.

I'm not an electrical engineer, so I don't audit these reports myself. What I can tell you from a procurement perspective is that the supplier's willingness to hand them over is itself a signal — and our electrical lead can verify the technical details once I've narrowed the field.

2. IP rating — and why "waterproof" is a useless word

IP65 means the fixture is dust-tight and can handle water jets. IP66 means it can handle powerful jets — the kind you'd see from a pressure washer or a heavy storm runoff angle. IP67 means it survives short immersion.

For outdoor flood and area lights on a commercial property, I treat IP65 as the floor and IP66 as the realistic target. If a supplier's spec sheet doesn't list an IP rating at all, I assume it hasn't been tested. If they say "weatherproof" without a number, same conclusion.

One exception worth flagging: installations less than a mile from saltwater or in a documented flood zone. In those cases I'd argue IP66 should be treated as the minimum, not an upgrade. I've seen units rated IP65 that pitted at the seams within eighteen months near the coast.

3. Solar panel + battery pairing — where quotes quietly lie

Here's the thing that tripped me up in 2022. Most solar lighting spec sheets list a panel wattage and a battery capacity, and both numbers look fine on their own. But the only question that matters is whether the panel can recharge the battery during the worst-weather week of the year at your specific latitude.

Ask this directly: "How many nights will this unit run at rated output if you get four consecutive days of low sun?" A straight answer comes with a number and an assumption (e.g., "two nights at 4,000 lumens, assuming 2.5 peak sun hours"). A vague answer means you're going to find out the hard way.

I'll admit this is where my expertise ends. Panel-to-battery sizing and MPPT controller selection are electrical territory, and I hand those questions off. But asking for the number — even without fully understanding the math behind it — already filters out a surprising share of suppliers who never thought anyone would ask.

4. Warranty — read the process, not the period

Every solar flood light supplier offers a five-year warranty. On paper, that sounds identical. What differs is what happens at month nineteen when one unit in a batch of forty fails.

Three questions, in this order:

1. Does the replacement ship first, or do we send the failed unit back and wait?
2. What's the typical turnaround on a claim?
3. Do they ship the same model, or "equivalent" (which is to say, something you'll have to match to the rest of the install)?

I won't sign a wholesale contract with a supplier who won't answer those in writing. The warranty period is negotiable. The process isn't.

Where Sunna Design sits in all this

Sunna Design has been on our radar for solar area light and flood light sourcing since late 2023, mostly because their product range covers the categories we actually need — floods, area lights, sports, street, wall. Their published specs line up with the checklist above, which is more than I can say for a lot of the quotes that land in my inbox. I haven't placed an order with them yet, so I won't pretend to have a verdict. What I will say is that a supplier who publishes LM-79 and LM-80 data openly, and doesn't hide the low-sun operating window in a sub-page, is already in a different category from the ones who don't.

If you're building an area light distributor buying guide for your own team, that distinction — open data versus hard-to-find data — is worth more than any single specification on the sheet.

When this framework doesn't apply

I should be honest: not every purchase needs this level of scrutiny. If you're buying one or two solar wall lights for a storage shed, or you need temporary lighting for a site that'll be demoed in six months, responsiveness probably matters more than whether the LM-80 report is current.

I use this checklist to filter every incoming quote, but the depth of verification I apply depends on the deployment. Long-term fixed installs: specs are everything. Temporary or low-stakes: I care about invoice compliance, delivery speed, and whether the unit works on day one.

There's also a category of supplier where this framework is a mismatch — small regional distributors who don't carry test documentation because they're reselling someone else's product. In those cases I go straight to the manufacturer's documentation, not theirs.

The one thing I'd keep

If someone reads this and only takes one thing away, I'd want it to be this: flood light and area light spec sheets look nearly identical across suppliers until you start asking for the underlying documents. LM-79, LM-80, IP rating, low-sun runtime, warranty process. Five requests. The suppliers who answer all five are the ones worth putting on a wholesale contract. The rest are guessing — and so would you be, if you signed without asking.