Security lighting and CCTVhow to light a camera scene properly

Spotting movement and identifying a person are two separate jobs. Night vision handles the first quite happily; it's good lighting that gives you the second, the colour, the face, the number plate you can actually use. So when a camera "sees in the dark", that on its own doesn't mean it'll tell you who was on the drive at 2am.

Be wary of the "minimum lux" figure printed on the box. There's no agreed test standard behind it, so two cameras quoting the same number can perform worlds apart in the same garden. It's close to meaningless as a buying number, so don't choose on it.

And this isn't an edge case in the East Midlands. Through winter a camera sits in night mode for most of the working day, so night image quality is really the main performance question for a UK install, not an afterthought. For a sense of scale, emergency lighting can legally drop to 0.5 lux, and that is nowhere near enough for footage you can use.

White LEDs keep the colour in the picture, so you can describe a red coat or a silver van. With infrared alone that detail is simply gone. The catch is that good colour at night needs good-quality light: aim for a CRI of 80 or higher and a colour temperature no warmer than about 4000K.

That's why "any old light" won't do. Old orange sodium street-style lighting throws away nearly all the colour information, so a scene can be bright and still useless for describing anyone. Visible white light also deters, which is a genuine bonus, but it draws power and adds light pollution if it's oversized or left burning all night, so it earns its keep best on entrances, driveways and anywhere colour really matters.

This is the single most common reason a night image looks foggy or washed white. When a camera's built-in IR is mounted close to a pale rendered wall, tucked under an eave, or squeezed into a narrow alley, the infrared reflects straight back into the lens, giving you white-out, ghosting and fog instead of a usable scene.

Leicester's terraced and semi streets are textbook for this, with their gennels, side returns and pale render all sitting inches from where a camera tends to go. The fixes are straightforward once you know to look: move the camera off the wall, angle it away from the bright surface, turn down or disable the onboard IR, or fit a separate offset IR illuminator on its own bracket so the source isn't sitting right beside the lens.

Here's the one that has people convinced their camera is faulty when it's working perfectly. A bright IR return from something close, a wall, a wheelie bin, a hedge, makes the camera pull its exposure and IR power down across the whole frame to cope with that near-field glare.

The result is a scene that "goes dark" beyond that close object, even though nothing's broken. The fix is planning the foreground at the survey: keep the near field clear and keep the camera off close pale surfaces, so the camera isn't forced to expose for the wheelie bin instead of the driveway.

Always-on lighting gives you consistent images, which the camera likes, but it burns energy and is exactly the sort of thing that upsets neighbours and gets the council involved. Motion-triggered lighting saves power and deters on demand, but the footage is a little less consistent and it leans on the trigger being reliable.

For most homes the sweet spot is a hybrid: a low always-on level that jumps bright the moment something's detected. You keep usable images through the night and still get the deterring flash when it matters, without lighting up the whole street from dusk till dawn.

Domestic floods typically run about 400-3000 lumens, with 4000-5000 reserved for larger plots, but bigger is genuinely not better. An oversized flood causes glare and over-exposure on camera and risks a light-nuisance complaint, so for most homes the lower end is the right call (ILP domestic guidance leans toward keeping fittings modest, not maximal).

On timing, PIR floods commonly stay on 30 seconds or more per trigger, and many can run that always-dim, bright-on-trigger hybrid. What matters far more than raw output is where it's aimed and that it's shielded downward, which we'll come to below.

The Institution of Lighting Professionals sets recommended obtrusive-light limits by Environmental Zone (E0 dark through to E4 urban) in its Guidance Note GN01/21. Light trespass is measured as vertical illuminance at a neighbour's window: in a low-brightness E2 area that's about 5 lux before curfew and 1 lux after, relaxing in brighter E3/E4 zones and tightening right down in darker ones.

Curfew is set by the planning authority and is commonly taken as 23:00, after which evening security lighting is expected to dim down or switch off. The ILP also publishes domestic guidance, GN09, "Domestic exterior lighting: getting it right!", which boils down to matching the light to the task and not spilling it onto neighbours or wildlife.

This matters locally because most of Leicester is built-up E3-E4 with neighbours close by, so spill onto adjoining gardens and bedroom windows is the single most common thing that drives a complaint. The answer is almost always to dim and aim, rather than blast.

The cleanest fix for almost every failure mode above is to design the lighting out before anything goes on the wall: IR bounce, silhouetting and neighbour spill are far easier to solve on paper at the survey than to patch after a bad install. In practice that means options like separate offset IR illuminators, white-light-on-detection wiring, and planning the power and cabling for the lights alongside the cameras rather than as an afterthought.

Professional-grade PoE cameras with AI person and vehicle detection can drive white-light-on-detection, so you get covert IR monitoring through the night plus a bright, deterring flash only when it actually matters. That hybrid approach leans on a reliable wired link to do its job, which is one of several reasons we build around wired PoE rather than Wi-Fi.

And yes, you can usually add a floodlight to existing cameras. Whether it improves the footage comes down entirely to placement, so it's worth a proper look before you buy. If you already know lighting is the gap, our floodlight installation in Leicester sits naturally alongside a full home CCTV setup.