Do Swimming Pool Lights Need Anti-glare?

What is glare?

In the working or living environment, some strong natural light or reflected light may cause a visual disturbance. Our eyes would feel uncomfortable in this kind of light, that’s glare.

Glare is often caused by below two reasons:

Uneven brightness distribution

The eyes accept a whole range of light. If the light intensity in some areas is too high in contrast to the surrounding areas, the eyes are easily affected by glare when they are in this light environment.

Daily LED light and sunlight lighting environments may also cause glare. Stainless steel doors and windows, glass, water surfaces, and even smooth and reflective tiles under the light will have glare entering the eyes at certain angles. If the glare is too strong, it will cause strong discomfort to the eyes, and people will generally quickly avoid this scene from their field of vision.

Extreme brightness contrast

If you quickly enter another scene from one scene and the brightness of the two scenes changes greatly, the eyes will feel very uncomfortable since they can’t adapt to the brightness changes in a short time.

For example, when you stay in a dark room for a while, it will be difficult to open your eyes if you quickly enter a bright environment outside.

The eye’s perception of light is amazing. When in a dark environment, the pupil of the eye will dilate, which is more conducive to capturing weak light. After a while, the room that was originally dark when you first entered it will become much clearer in terms of vision.

When the eyes adapt to a dark environment, if they quickly enter a bright environment, the pupils will not have time to shrink to the extent of adaptation. This can cause excess light to enter the eye through the pupil, causing all kinds of discomfort. Don’t worry, this condition is only temporary and your eyes will recover fully soon.

Is glare harmful to people?

The answer is uncertain. There will also be glare in the swimming pool due to light, water, ambient brightness and other reasons. Glare is common in man-made or natural environments.

Glare will only cause harm to human health or safety when the intensity is too large, the contrast between light and dark is too large or too fast. We cannot eliminate all glare, nor do we need to. Eliminating or avoiding harmful glare and rational use of harmless glare will make our life more colorful.

When you look at the golden or white lake, you will feel its beauty. This level of glare is not harmful to humans.

Professional lighting designers even use glare to achieve stunning visuals. It will not cause harm to people if the producer can control the intensity and quantity well.

Effects of harmful glare on humans

When human eyes are severely stimulated by excessive glare, it may cause the following effects on health or personal safety:

Eye symptoms

Watering, redness, constant blinking, easy eye fatigue, temporary vision loss or blindness.

Symptoms elsewhere in the body

Headache, nausea.

Personal Safety Impact

Eyes exposed to strong glare may be dizzy, unable to see clearly or temporarily blind. It is easy to fall and hurt while walking and exercising. It is easy to cause various safety accidents when driving and operating machinery.

Effects on infants and young children

The eye organs of children and infants are not yet fully developed, and their ability to adjust and adapt to light and the environment is weaker than that of adults. Prolonged exposure to glare can damage retinal tissue and cause damage to vision. Today, glare has become one of the important causes of vision loss among teenagers.

Effects on the old people

The body’s metabolism will gradually decline with age. The old people are less able to adapt to the environment and physically recover than younger people. Older people have a harder time adjusting to the same glare. Long-term exposure to harmful glare can lead to accelerated vision loss in the elderly.

Is LED pool light anti-glare necessary?

In most cases, pool lights do not need to be intentionally anti-glare. Swimming pool lights are mainly used to irradiate water bodies. The distribution and irradiation angle of the lights are arranged so that the human eye will not look directly at the swimming pool lights during normal use. In addition, the brightness of the light will be weakened after it penetrates the water body, reducing the impact on the human eye.

If there are old people in the family, children or some people who are sensitive to light can pay attention to anti-glare. Some people who pay attention to the quality of life have higher requirements for the comfort of lighting, and they will consider doing anti-glare for swimming pools.

Causes and solutions of glare caused by swimming pool lights

Common causes of pool glare:

• The distance of swimming pool lights is unreasonable.
• The side walls and bottom of the pool reflect too much light.
• Swimming pool lights have a variety of irradiation angles such as 15°, 30°, 45°, 60°, 120°, etc., and the irradiation angle of the lights used for installation is not suitable.
• Pool lights are bright.
• The swimming pool lights are very bright, but the surrounding environment is too dark.

Solution:

• Reasonably plan the arrangement and distribution of swimming pool lights.
• Spray the tiles with a coat of matte paint.
• Use the underwater lights with an appropriate angle.
• Replace the low-power lights or use a suitable dimmable power supply.
• Add appropriate lighting to the surrounding dark environment.

Anti-glare LED swimming pool light

In order to reduce the impact of strong light and glare on the eyes, many LED lighting will equip with anti-glare lenses or lamp shades. Anti-glare designs are very common in home lighting, and some LED pool lights also have anti-glare lenses.

The lenses of anti-glare pool lights are specially designed to reduce brightness while making the light distribution more uniform and soft, greatly reducing the generation of glare and reducing the impact of glare.

There are many anti-glare processes for LED pool lights, here list some most representative ways as follows:

1. Imitation honeycomb

Imitation honeycomb lens has a large number of small hexagonal lenses and looks a bit like a honeycomb. When the light is through the lens, the hexagonal structure can filter the light by diffuse reflection. The light passing through the lens becomes softer and more uniform, reducing eye irritation.

2. Layered refraction

Some pool owners want the pool light to irradiate the water as much as possible, so the emergence of the layered diffraction function lens to solve this problem.

This lens structure divides into two layers, the upper and lower, arranged with obvious differences and easily identified. The light is refracted when passing through the upper layer and is parallel to the water surface; the light is evenly diffused when passing through the lower layer. The use of lighting design of the pool water effect better looks and does not irritate the eyes.

3. Stripes or raised particles

This is also a common anti-glare design. Lenses with this design have a large number of stripes or raised particles that soften the light by refraction. The appearance of the lenses may vary somewhat from manufacturer to manufacturer, but the structure is basically similar.

WAKING has professional engineers and a service team, if you have any related questions about LED pool lights, please feel free to contact us.