I’d purchased two Light-O-Rama 50W RGB floodlights for my display this year. These things are beasts. I debated over the package of eight 10W or getting two 50W. I decided on the 50W because I wasn’t quite sure what the mountings would be like. Now that I have the 50’s I’m super glad I went that route as the are super bright. I expect to get more of these next year.
As I mentioned I was not sure what the mounting points would be like or what I would need to do to mount them on the ground. My plan was to replace the 2 LED floods (1 red, 1 Green) I point up at my large spruce tree, these sit at the bottom of the tree so I needed a way to get the floodlight off the ground. I started to do some research and found a simple solution using milk crates posted by NJJohn on the LOR Forum.
This is the solution I decided to pursue as it would get the floods well off the ground and prevent them from being buried under snow and also seemed like a simple solution compared to the complex ones I’d been dreaming up. I made one minor change to NJJohn’s original build by mounting my power supply on the inside of the crate, as one forum user had suggested.
About $30 of hardware from Home Depot, for a couple of milk crates 4 3/16″ bolts and washers and some 8-32 nuts and bolts gave me all I needed.
Now to build them, the first step was to attach the power supply:
- Drill 4 holes in the crate to match the mount points of the power supply
- Insert the first 2 bolts
- loosely threaded on the first 2 nuts
- Slide the power supply onto the first 2 bolts & tighten it down
- insert the last 2 bolts and tighten the nuts down
Once the power supply was mounted it was time to mount the flood to the crate:
- Remove the mounting bracket from the light
- Center the bracket on the crate
- put the bolts and washers through the bracket and crate
- tighten the bolts
- Mount the light back into the bracket
- Thread the cables through the holes in the create
- Reconnect the flood to the power supply
After doing this I had a nice clean install and an incredible stable base, even better I can stack the crates and protect the floods when I put them away for the year (I’ll just need to get one more crate to cover the top light after the season).
Below are a couple of videos of me testing out the floodlight’s brightness when I first received them.
Testing it against the tree from the living room through the window (there will be 2 of these right under this tree pointing up.
Testing it in my kitchen, my eyes still hurt watching this.
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