As a construction professional, you will need good lighting to ensure that you can do your work properly. Many professionals are able to work using natural lighting for the most part, but this doesn’t solve every problem. In fact, sometimes you have plenty of light, but it’s in the wrong place so you continue to struggle. Here are five signs that you aren’t getting enough lighting in your workspace.

Your Eyes Get Tired During a Shift
If you’re wondering why you struggle to see things during certain tasks, think about the way your eyes feel at the end of the day. People who have to squint or work harder to focus may notice that their eyes get tired after they have been doing it for a while. This is a common problem. For example, you might feel eyestrain after a weekend of birdwatching, or after hours of observing a sports game at a distance. Tired eyes are working harder. And if it’s not the precision of the task that you’re doing and it’s not your vision in general, it’s almost certainly the lighting.

You Get Frequent Headaches While Working
When your eyes get tired, and you don’t do anything about it to make it better, you’re more likely to get headaches on the job. You may get headaches around your eyes, and also a pain in your neck and shoulders from the strain. Headaches while working in construction can be a significant safety hazard. This problem increases your risk because it can slow down your mental processing speed and make you more likely to slip or make mistakes. Headaches from eyestrain may be easy to manage with an over-the-counter analgesic and getting into a different space for a while. But on the other hand, adding some task lighting or increasing the light level of the entire space may solve it more completely.

You Lose Equipment or Materials During a Task
You’re probably familiar with the phrase “trying to find a needle in a haystack.” The premise of the idiom is that you’re going to have a harder time finding small items in a place where there are lots of similar small items. But when you’re on the job, you want everything to be in easy view. If you’re struggling to locate what you need in a hurry, it might be a matter of organization. Getting small tools and materials in order can help. But it’s not a guarantee. Increasing lighting makes you less likely to squint and need to focus. Even adding a battery-operated lighting option to set next to your toolbox could make all the difference.

You’ve Had a Recent Vision Test
Of course, a lot of these symptoms could be an indicator of vision problems. As people get into their 40s and 50s, they are more likely to need something like reading glasses to help them see precisely at a short distance. On the other hand, these signs aren’t always to blame on the quality of your vision. It’s worth getting a vision exam at least once every few years, especially after you turn 40. But if your vision seems to be in good order, then it’s likely these problems are caused by insufficient lighting in your workplace.

You Can’t See What You’re Doing
One of the hazards of working in construction is that you aren’t always doing the work inside a functional structure. Sometimes you’re working outside, and other times you’re working in a building that may not have electricity. In these instances, you’re probably going to find yourself with inadequate lighting to do the work. The good news is that there are lots of options you can use to dramatically increase the lighting of the space without having to wait for someone to run line voltage through. Just keep in mind that it is almost always better to have too much lighting than not enough.

Running a contracting business requires a lot of additional considerations, like sufficient lighting for the work you do. Your choices can make all the difference. To get started building your contracting business, visit CSLS today!