How Many Uplights Do You Need for a Wedding?

When planning a beautiful wedding reception lighting arrangement, there's no doubt that uplights will be a feature of your wedding lighting lineup. But there's often confusion about how many you might need to hire for your special day. Is it best to hire as many as you can afford? Or should you take a less is more approach?

The number of uplights you will need for your wedding will depend on many factors, such as the square footage of your venue, whether you plan to use them indoors or outside (or both), and the overall theme for your wedding venue decor. Small and intimate wedding receptions may only need 6-8 uplight fixtures, whereas larger celebrations with hundreds of guests may require 20+ devices.

It's impossible to give you a straight answer to a question about how many uplights you might need to hire without gathering further details, as no two weddings are the same. From custom event decor to the specific room dimensions, so many variables will influence the final number you arrive at.

However, we can explain a little more about the factors that you will have to consider before settling on exactly what you will need in terms of uplights.

Factors That Will Influence How Many Lights You Will Need to Hire for Your Sussex Event

Uplights (or uplighters, if you prefer) represent an easy and affordable way to alter the look and feel of an entire room or wedding venue. However, despite their popularity within event lighting, getting the number you hire right can be tricky. You want to make the room feel balanced and leave enough scope for other lighting fixtures (such as table lighting) to have their own respective impacts.

So with that in mind, let's run through a few of the key considerations you'll have when trying to decide how many you'll need for your event space.

Will You Need Indoor or Outdoor Uplights? Or Both?

The best place to start is with their initial location. Due to their versatility, you can use them in a number of ways, and thus they are often used in multiple rooms and around the exterior of your beautiful venue.

For exterior uplights, you'll want to focus on the most impressive architectural elements and thus may only need 8-10 uplights to cover the side of your building that the guests will see. If your guests have visual access to the entire place, you might need to hire plenty more for maximum coverage.

If you aren't interested in exterior uplighting, that's perfectly fine. Moving indoors, you need to think about their role. Are you going to use them to highlight architectural columns? Or are you thinking of using them purely as mood lighting? If you are going for both aspects, your number of uplights will obviously increase.

Total Square Footage of Your Sussex Event Venue

It almost goes without saying that the bigger the area you need to cover, the higher the number of uplights you need. If you have booked a huge venue, you will have to toss up whether you want to pursue full coverage or moderate coverage.

While these fixtures do through up fairly broad beams of light, there are instances where enormous columns (which usually pop up in castles, churches, and country estate mansions) may require doubling up. Uplighting columns generally only require one uplight per column. However, you may want to put one uplight on either side to cover the entire column in your chosen colour. Obviously, the larger the space, the more columns you are likely to have.

But what if you don't have columns or architectural features that you want to highlight? If you are using uplights to alter the ambience of your venue, then square footage is going to be the deciding factor. It's a simple case of the more extensive the overall perimeter of your space, the more uplights you'll need.

Custom Event Decor of Your Sussex Wedding

Of course, your overall event decor theme or style will play a role in your decisions regarding your uplights. It could be that uplights don't have much significance in your event design, meaning you'll need a lot less of them. You may then choose to focus your budget on dance floor lighting or stage lighting instead.

In other circumstances, you might want to use uplights to highlight focal areas of your reception decor. Whatever the case may be, your overall decor theme will influence the number of lights needed. The more lighting plays its part in your decor, the more likely it is that uplighting will feature heavily within your plans.

Choose Sussex-based QOKO Events to Help You Create a Beautiful Wedding Reception

At QOKO Events, we are on hand to help you plan, implement, and operate your wedding lighting. We have a range of uplights for your to choose from, and we also offer wireless, battery-operated versions for outdoor events.

Better still, we can take care of the remaining wedding event production, giving you a stress-free event lighting hire experience. From dance floor lighting to the stage, sound systems, and everything in between, QOKO Events has you covered.

Simply give our team a call on 01403 626008 or fill out our online contact form to get the ball rolling on creating the perfect wedding celebration.