What Changes When an LED Floor Goes Outside

Is There Outdoor Rated Furniture?

Yes, and you should ask for it by name.

There is a dedicated indoor and outdoor line, and it is a different product from the standard indoor pieces rather than the same thing used bravely. For an event at the Arts Council of Princeton the order specified cocktail tables from that line explicitly, alongside four bars and sixty floor units. There are outdoor bars in the same line, including a 48 inch unit.

The reason to be specific is that nobody will guess your event is outside from a booking form. If the tables are going on a lawn or a terrace, say so and the right pieces get loaded.

How Long Will It Stay Lit Without Power?

Six to eight hours on a charge, or sixteen to twenty with backup packs.

Outdoors you are usually on battery, which puts the whole event on a clock. The mistake that catches people is switching everything on during set-up because it looks good, then finding the tables fading during the speeches. Switch on for the party, not for the load-in.

If there is mains power available and a safe route for a cable, take it. A plugged in floor has no clock and gives you the full color range, which brings us to the trade.

What Do You Lose Outdoors?

Fine color control, and it is worth knowing before you plan a palette around it.

Our floors normally run red, green and blue plus dedicated warm and cool white channels, which is what allows a true pastel and synchronized color changing programs. A floor that has to run on battery, because it is outdoors or because it needs to be highly portable, uses the battery lighting instead. That means no true pastels and no synchronized programs across pieces.

Backup batteries solve the runtime. They do not bring the color control back.

So if you are matching an exact palette, the honest advice is to get power to the floor. If you cannot, plan around strong colors rather than soft ones and the room will still look considered. We go through what each system can do in our guide to color matching.

What About the Ground?

The units need a flat, sound surface, so grass, gravel and tired decking all mean a subfloor first.

This is normal and it is not our carpentry. What we do is supply the information for it. On a film shoot at Fort Wadsworth the location floor was too poor to build on, so we sent the production photos of the unit bases and their crew framed a subfloor in plywood and 2x4s to suit. The same approach works for a marquee on a lawn.

Raise it early, because a subfloor is a day of somebody else's work and it cannot be improvised while a truck waits.

What Happens if It Rains?

You move indoors, which only works if somebody decided in advance where indoors is.

We built four separate stages for one party across two floors of the same building, and the largest of them, an 8ft by 20ft performer stage at 24 inches, was specified for the roof. It rained. The stage went inside instead. That was possible because the build was modular and because there was a room to put it in, not because anyone got lucky on the day.

So when you book an outdoor event, book the fallback at the same time. Where does the floor go, is the route to it wide enough, and who makes the call and by when. A wet-weather plan agreed a week out costs nothing. The same conversation at 2pm on the day costs a great deal.

We deliver, install and break down across the tri-state area, from Manhattan and Brooklyn to Long Island, across New Jersey and up through Connecticut.