Colarsun 60
Parking Area Retrofit

The Problem With Most Parking Area Upgrades

When a facility needs better outdoor lighting, the conventional path involves significant civil works: breaking up the surface, running new cable, installing new poles, reinstating the ground. It's disruptive, expensive, and time-consuming. For an operational facility like Leonardo Aerospace's UK site — where the car park is in daily use — that kind of downtime is simply not acceptable.

Bullard Solar specified the Colarsun 60 as a retrofit solution. The existing poles stayed. No trenching. No new civil works.

How the Colarsun Works

The Colarsun's defining feature is its 360° vertical solar panel — a collar that wraps around the existing pole, collecting solar energy from all directions throughout the day. Unlike a conventional flat panel that must be angled south and mounted separately, the Colarsun installs directly onto whatever is already in the ground. Thirty units, thirty existing poles, transformed into fully solar-powered luminaires.

High-performance LEDs and LiFePO4 long-life batteries handle the rest. Motion sensors dim the lights when the area is empty — extending battery reserves significantly for the early mornings and late evenings when the site is quiet — and bringing them to full brightness the moment activity is detected. For a car park that fills and empties on a predictable cycle, that intelligence makes real-world sense.

Solar in the UK: The Reserve Question

The UK's reputation for grey skies is not entirely undeserved. Any solar specification for a British site has to answer the question honestly: what happens when it rains for four days straight?

The Colarsun 60's battery capacity is engineered to maintain full output through four consecutive days of overcast conditions without any solar input. That's the standard Bullard Solar holds its solutions — not best-case performance, but worst-case reliability.

Leonardo Aerospace now has a fully solar-powered, motion-responsive car park with no grid connection and no ongoing electricity cost. The poles they already had did the rest.