# Positioning Black Light - Need Tips



## colmmoo (Jul 23, 2005)

I went to Spirit yesterday and saw a 24" vertical black light on a platform. Would that work as well as having the black light bars installed from above? 

How many strips of black light do you need to light up a room that's around 8 yards across and 5 yards wide?


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## Long_Tom (Oct 26, 2005)

What are you trying to illuminate? If you just flood the whole room with black light, you will light up any white clothing that your guests are wearing. (And their teeth, too.) Clothing detergents contain brightening compounds that fluoresce. The result may be more focus on each others' glowing clothes than on what you want them to be looking at (though you could use that as a distraction), or else the glowing shirts will shed more light on things you might prefer to stay in the shadows. Also, black light shining directly in the eyes is kind of uncomfortable. 

Unless you want to illuminate the guests, I suggest keeping the black lights near the things that you want to glow, carefully aiming and barn-dooring the fixtures so they don't shine on the rest of the room.

If you _do_ want to flood the room, I'd say go with regular ceiling strips. The floor-standing model sounds like it's asking for disaster: to get kicked over or otherwise broken. For a 15 x 24 foot area, I'd say 3 four-foot dual-tube strip fixtures, placed at intervals of roughly thirds along the ceiling, ought to do the trick. 

Draw a rough scale sketch of your space, and pencil in 4-foot tube fixtures, and you'll get a rough idea of the coverage. (Imagine what they would do with regular white tubes. You'll get the same approximate coverage, only in ultraviolet.)


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## papaghost (Sep 23, 2006)

I think you can do better price-wise by going to the local home improvement store. A couple of the big-box stores have 24" single blub black light assemblies (which you can mount vertically, horizontally, or anywhere in between) that run about $15 (in central North Cadaver). If you really need a lot, you can get a bargain 48" fixture and add your own bulbs. 

Like Long Tom says, how and where you mount them depends on what you're trying to do. Last year I did flood a room with the effects he mention - everbody and their costumes glowed. That was my intention, but if you have specific things you want highlighted, then isolating and aiming is the way to go.

Papa


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## Wolfman (Apr 15, 2004)

We did a Dot Room of about that size (24'x12') last year and we had three 24" tubes mounted at the ceiling. It was pretty much perfect for that effect.


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## Stratusfear02 (Aug 5, 2004)

I'm mounting my 2-48" fixtures as high as i can on my tent frames to illuminate the widest area possible for my cameras to see.


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