Milk Crates and Floodlights

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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