Lighting Towers for Night Work: How Many Your Site Needs and Where to Put Them

A raft pour in 6th of October is scheduled for 9 pm because the August afternoons are too hot to place concrete without the mix losing workability in the truck. The site has one lighting tower, and it is parked where the delivery driver left it — by the gate, lighting the security cabin beautifully. The pump boom, the vibrator crew and the finishers are working in the shadow of the reinforcement cage, and the surveyor is checking levels by the light of a phone. Nobody planned the lighting. It was the last item on the list, so it got the last of the attention.

Night work is ordinary in Egypt. Summer concrete goes in after dark to keep placement temperatures under control, road and utility crews in Cairo and Alexandria work when traffic falls away, and time-bound projects in the new cities run two shifts. In every case the quality of the work at 2 am depends on whether people can see what they are doing, and the mobile lighting tower is the simplest tool for making that happen. This guide covers what the machine is, how much light a task genuinely needs, how to work out the number of towers, and the placement mistakes that turn a well-lit site into a glare problem.

What a mobile lighting tower actually is

The standard unit on Egyptian sites is a trailer-mounted mast, usually between 7 and 9 metres when raised, carrying four to six floodlights, powered by a small diesel engine and alternator on the same chassis. The mast is hand-winched or hydraulic and on most units rotates so the lamp head can be aimed without moving the trailer; four outriggers level and stabilise it. The fuel tank is sized to run a full night shift — how many nights per fill depends on the lamp type and engine, and is one of the first questions for a rental provider.

The lamp head is where towers differ most, and the difference decides a lot of how you run the night.

Offered a choice, LED units earn their rate back in fuel and in the absence of a dead spell every time somebody kills the engine to move the trailer. If the fleet only has metal halide, light the towers before dusk and do not switch them off between tasks.

How much light a task actually needs

Light on a site is measured in lux at the working surface, and "walk safely" and "check a level" differ by an order of magnitude. Have the site safety/lighting specialist set the required illuminance for each task and emergency route under the applicable requirements. Use the actual tower's photometric data and verify light at the work surface with a suitable meter. A generic lux table cannot establish adequate lighting for every task.

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Working out how many towers

Manufacturers publish a coverage figure for each tower in square metres. Treat it as an upper bound: it is measured on flat open ground to the lowest useful lux level, with no obstructions. A real site has a reinforcement cage, a pump, a crane, stockpiles and parked trucks, every one of which throws a shadow exactly where someone is working. A more reliable method:

1. Split the night's work into zones: the active work face, the plant positions, the truck route from gate to work face, the laydown, and any excavation edges or open shafts.
2. Have the competent designer assign each zone a light level from the task assessment and applicable requirements.
3. Light every active work zone from two sides. One tower lights a surface; two towers at different angles remove the shadow the first one created. This single rule is why a pour with "enough" towers by area still looks dark at the point of the trowel.
4. Add one tower for the route trucks and people travel, unless the work-zone towers already spill onto it.
5. Keep one spare on any pour that cannot be stopped. A tower that fails at 1 am with concrete in the trucks is not a lighting problem, it is a structural problem.

There is no reliable tower count without the site layout, task requirements and the selected model’s lighting data. On a linear job — a pipeline trench, a road section — the count follows the length of the active work, and the towers move with the crew as it advances.

Placement: where the trailer goes matters more than how bright it is

The most common night-site failure is not too little light but light in the wrong direction. A few rules that hold on any Egyptian site:

• Light from behind and above the workers, not into their faces. A tower on the far side of the pour, aimed back at the crew, blinds them and leaves their work in their own shadow.
• Keep glare out of the crane cab and off the public road. A lamp head aimed at the horizon dazzles the crane operator lifting over the pour and the drivers on the adjacent road. A mast at full height with a steep lamp angle covers more ground with less glare than a low mast aimed flat — towers left half-raised because nobody wanted to fight the winch are a waste of the rental.
• Stay off excavation edges and fresh backfill, on level ground with all four outriggers down and timber pads under them where the ground is loose. A mast at 8 metres is a lever, and the trailer under it is heavy.
• Stay out of the crane's swing and the trucks' turning circle. Plan tower positions on the same drawing as the pump and truck positions. A tower that gets shoved aside at 11 pm to let a mixer past ends up lighting the fence.
• Watch the wind. Every tower has a maximum wind speed for the raised mast. On coastal sites and in spring khamsin conditions, lower the masts when the wind gets up.
• Check overhead lines before every raise. A raised mast near a live cable is one of the few ways a lighting tower can kill someone.
• Noise and exhaust. Near housing the engine runs all night; face the units away from neighbours and the crew's break area.

Running it through the night

A lighting tower is a small diesel machine and fails for the reasons any small diesel machine does: no fuel, dirty fuel, a flat battery, a clogged filter. On a night shift each of those becomes a stopped pour.

• Fuel before dusk, every day. On most rentals of simple support equipment in Egypt the tower goes out dry — no operator, fuel on the hirer — so the night foreman owns this task. The same discipline that applies to fuel on excavators and loaders applies here: clean diesel, a filter on the nozzle, no water in the can.
• Test it in daylight. Start the engine, raise the mast, switch on every lamp and aim the head before the shift. A dead lamp found at sunset is manageable; found at midnight it is not.
• Use the timer or photocell if the unit has one. It saves a walk around the site at dusk and the fuel of a tower left burning into the morning.
• Do not run cables across the pour. If you are running extension cords from the tower's auxiliary socket across the work, the tower is in the wrong place.
• Report a fault immediately. Most contracts define a response window, and it starts when you call.

When something other than a tower is the better answer

A fixed compound with a large generator already running is often better served by cabled floodlights on poles or scaffold — cheaper for long-term static lighting, but useless the moment the work moves, and every cable on the ground is a night hazard. If you are sizing site power, count lighting in the generator load only if it will actually be cabled; self-powered towers add nothing to it. High-rise sites often run floodlights from the tower crane, which lights the whole footprint from above without ground shadows. Balloon lights are nearly glare-free and suit road works beside live traffic. The trailer-mounted tower wins on anything that moves: pours that migrate across a slab, trenching, road sections, and any site where the light will need to be somewhere else next week.

Questions for the rental provider

1. LED or metal halide? If halide, ask for a spare lamp with the unit.
2. Mast height, hydraulic or manual.
3. Runtime on a full tank at full output, in hours, so refuelling can be planned against the shift.
4. Who fuels and who moves it. Most lighting towers in Egypt go out dry, but the wet-versus-dry terms still need to be written down.
5. How it arrives. Towed behind a vehicle with a suitable hitch, or on a flatbed and lifted off — confirm which, and who unloads.
6. Response time if it fails at 2 am, and whether a replacement is in the fleet.
7. Maximum wind speed for the raised mast, so the night foreman has a number, not a guess.

To see what is available for a night programme, browse lighting towers and other access equipment or request a project quote with your pour dates and site layout — quantity and placement are easier to get right when the fleet can see where the work is.

The short version

Plan lighting as part of the pour, not after it: zone the work, light each face from two sides, keep the trailers off edges and out of the crane's swing, aim lamps down, and fuel and test everything before sunset. Do that and the night shift produces the same concrete as the day shift.