Lighting is involved in a lot of the aluminum canopy projects at Mitchell Metals. You can browse our gallery to see how architects can incorporate lights into our structures. Since architects often have lights become a part of our structure, one of the questions we get most frequently is, “How do you install lighting on an aluminum canopy?”
Installing Lighting for Your Metal Canopy
Through the many years of installing aluminum canopies and working with electrical contractors who install the lights, we have found two best practices to follow.
How to Run Conduit for the Canopy Lighting
The most successful way we have seen to run the conduit and wiring along the canopy for the lighting is to run the conduit on top of the canopy after it has been installed. This has multiple benefits which include the conduit not being visible, not having to penetrate the canopy framing to run the conduit underneath, allows the canopy installer and lighting installer to work separately instead of entangled together. This will give a clean look on the underside of the canopy, because the lighting conduit is not required to be painted to match the canopy. Since most of our canopy systems use extruded decking, the canopy systems can sustain 2-3 people walking around on top. This allows the electricians to run the conduit on top of the canopy without the risk of damaging the canopy system.
How to Install the Junction Box
On our typical cap and pan decking system, the junction box where the light is to be connected needs to be installed at the decking cap. The electrician can mount the junction box on the underside of the decking cap which requires only a 1” penetration hole through the cap. The hole needs to be fully sealed on the top side to keep any water from coming through. The decking cap does not carry any of the water of the system (this is what the decking pan does), so it only sees direct rainfall and no flowing water and therefore has a very low chance of leaking water.
Mitchell Metals can provide the aluminum canopy of your choice, and we can work with an electrician to install lighting on the structure. Our experts can instruct the electrician on our best practices for installing the lighting. Contact us today for questions about metals awnings, or check out our downloadable specs.