Ocean Beach pickup ultimate in SF uses the below described setup for nighttime beach frisbee games.
Regulation fields are 150' x 90', ours is probably slightly smaller.
We get 90+ min (probably 2h+) of playtime out of this setup (batteries can be upgraded if you want more time).
| Price | Item and quantity | Amazon link |
|---|---|---|
| 139.98$ | 4x 100W LED floodlights, 10,000lm 5000K | Buy two 2-packs |
| 79.98$ | 4x 9' photo studio light stands | Buy two 2-packs |
| 43.98$ | 4x 6' extension cords | Buy two 2-packs |
| 523.96$ | 4x 220Wh portable power generator | Buy four |
| 5.42$ | Loctite | Buy one |
| - | 4x power cable with NEMA 5-15 plug | n/a (cannibalized some spare IEC power cables) |
| - | 4x 1/4-20 nut | n/a (used spare 80-20 nuts) |
| - | 12x 3/16"x2" heat shrink | n/a (used spare supplies) |
| - | 4x 3/8"x2" heat shrink | n/a (used spare supplies) |
| - | solder | n/a |
Total comes out to 793.32$ (with 8.5% sales tax this is 860.75$).
Tools required: soldering iron, a monkey wrench, and another wrench for the nut. (Heat gun is recommended for the heat shrink.) If there is a makerspace local to you, they should have all of these tools (as well as the consumables listed above: solder, heat shrink, nuts, and loctite).
- The floodlights are meant to be wired into an electrical junction, so you'll need to solder them to the power cables. This isn't a soldering tutorial, so I'll leave it at that (just remember: heat shrink needs to go on before you solder!).
- Bolt down the lights to the stands using the middle hole on their mounting bracket (the stands have a 1/4-20 stud on them). Make sure you apply loctite to the threads. (This is where the monkey wrench comes in: you'll need it to tighten the nut against the stud.)
We also duct tape over every single port on the portable power generator because we play on sand, as well as the cooling vents (I am only comfortable doing this because we only use this setup at night - temps are probably 50-60°F - otherwise I would not be OK doing this).
We set up the lights around the middle of the side of each endzone and put the batteries along the middles of the two sides of the field. Splitters plug into the battery, we run extension cords to the lights, turn them on, and then raise the stands all the way up. I'd recommend tying knots where the cords plug into each other to prevent them from accidentally coming apart (the cables are long enough that you should have plenty of slack at both ends, but just in case), like so:
Note that because we use this setup at a beach, we can dig the stands into the sand, which helps significantly with their balance and stability. If you were to use this setup on a grass or turf field, you will likely need sandbags or stakes to secure them - I suspect this is particularly important because it's much more likely you'll damage the light if it falls over on grass or turf, whereas at a beach the sand cushions the impact a lot.
You probably also want to bring a headlamp or flashlight or something to help light things up while you're tearing down and carrying everything to cars.
- Using a gas-powered generator, because lugging fuel around is annoying.
- Using a single beefy battery to power all the lights, but running extension cords across the field is a big no-no for obvious reasons and running the cords around the endzones would be really annoying.
- Using a jury-rigged battery setup (Samlex 12VDC->120VAC inverter was going to be 160$, 12V 3.5A NOCO genius charger was going to be 60$, batteries were 100$-200$ depending on how beefy you want, and then another 30$ or so for crimp terminals and 8AWG wire) but that would've been a lot of work for something much less usable. The Jackery battery power station that we got comes with a lot of nice-to-haves, like automatic shutoff over 200W load and % indicators for battery capacity (really useful for having an idea of how much time you have left), and frankly it was practically the same price for the same battery capacity (possibly even cheaper, actually).
We started with a mix of 60W and 100W lights because it wasn't clear, before the fact, whether the 60W lights would be sufficient or the 100W lights would be necessary. It ended up being the case that the 100W lights were necessary. (It's possible that if the light fixtures were modified to not diffuse light over such a wide angle, you could go with lower power ones.)
We also specifically chose the Onforu lights because they can tilt down (technically up). The original 100W lights we purchased were from Olafus and worked fine, but they cannot physically be tilted down, only up. (These floodlights are generally used to light up, say, a backyard, so they're actually supposed to be mounted bracket-side up, but we're mounting them bracket-side down on the stands, which I suspect is why the Olafus ones can only tilt up when mounted bracket-side down.)
We had two 292Wh battery power stations in the middle of each side of the field, the four 100W lights at the front corners of each endzone, and ran 100' extension cords to each light from the battery on its side.
We switched to using four 220Wh batteries, not only because they were cheaper, but also because they allowed us to get rid of the 100' extension cords (which were surprisingly tedious to transport, setup, and tear down).
We also talked to folks from LA and Santa Barbara. I'm told that SB's setup is similar to ours, but LA's is slightly different: in addition to floodlights, they also use 14-18 sets of stands, DSLR lights (Amazon), and camera batteries (Amazon). If you work at a photography studio and could just borrow all that stuff from the office, then that will probably work fine, but I wasn't super excited about such a complicated rig.