Grip and power hire: the 21% missing from your lighting budget

Two ARRI SkyPanel S60-Cs are £390 a day at Shoot Blue. The two C-stands holding them up are £12. Four sandbags stopping those stands going over are £10.

Twenty-two pounds of kit is all that stands between £390 of lighting and the floor, and it is the first line anyone deletes when a budget gets tight.

That is the shape of grip hire. Every item is trivially cheap on its own, which is exactly why the category gets skipped, and why a lighting order costs about a fifth more than the lamps it is named after.

The real cost of a two-lamp setup

Priced at one house so the comparison is like for like, checked on 3 October 2026. All figures exclude VAT.

Item	Day rate
2 × ARRI SkyPanel S60-C	£390.00
2 × 40" C-stand with arm and knuckle	£12.00
4 × sandbag	£10.00
1 × Honda EU20i generator	£58.00
Total	£470.00

With VAT that is £564. The lamps are £390 of it and everything else is £80, or 21% on top.

Nobody books it that way. People book "two SkyPanels", get a price, put £390 in the budget and discover the rest on the day — usually at the point when a sparks asks what the lamps are standing on.

The cheapest line is the one doing the safety work

Look again at the £22.

A SkyPanel S60-C on a C-stand at head height, outdoors, in October, is a sail. The sandbags are not an accessory to the stand; they are the reason the stand stays upright with a few hundred pounds of fixture on an arm. At £2.50 each they are the cheapest thing on the entire order and the only line on it whose job is to stop someone getting hurt.

Two bags per stand is the normal minimum, which is why there are four in the table for two lamps. If you are flying anything on an arm, off-centre, or anywhere with a breeze, that is a floor rather than a target.

The honest version of the advice: when the budget needs cutting, cut a lamp. Cutting a lamp costs you a look. Cutting the bags costs you a stand, a fixture and possibly a person, and saves ten pounds.

Power is the line that actually hurts

The generator is £58, which is 15% of the lamp hire on its own and more than four times the entire grip order.

It is also the line most likely to be forgotten completely, because on a studio or office shoot it genuinely does not exist. Mains is free. The moment the location is a field, a car park, a disused building or anywhere the owner will not let you run 2kW off a domestic ring main, it reappears at full price.

Worth knowing what the money buys at that rate: Shoot Blue supplies the EU20i with a full tank of unleaded and a 5-litre jerry can. Fuel on a long day is a real cost and a real errand, and a generator that arrives empty on a Sunday in Hackney is a problem with no solution.

On load, do the arithmetic before you book rather than after. Two S60-Cs draw 400W each at maximum according to ARRI's own specification, so 800W with both at full output — but what actually matters is everything else sharing that generator, and what else is on the circuit if you are on mains. That is a gaffer's calculation, not a spreadsheet's, and getting it wrong trips the supply mid-take.

Where this leaves the shoot-day budget

We costed a full London day at £1,689.52 and put the lighting line at £382.80 for two SkyPanels from a rental house. That figure was the lamps only.

Add grip and power on the same basis and the lighting department is closer to £470 before VAT, which moves the day by roughly a hundred pounds and makes lighting a larger share of the equipment bill than the camera department rather than merely comparable to it.

It also changes the advice in that piece slightly. We said cut the lighting list before the camera, because one fewer lamp saves more than a cheaper body. That still holds, and it holds harder once you count what each lamp drags behind it: a fixture is never just a fixture, it is a fixture, a stand, two bags and a share of the power.

What is listed here

Grip and power are the thinnest part of this catalogue after lighting and sound. There are a couple of tripods and no stands, no bags, no distro and no generators, so every figure above comes from a rental house.

Of everything in that table, stands and sandbags are the most obviously listable things anyone could put up: they are cheap to own, close to indestructible, and they go out with every lighting order rather than competing for the one job a month a specialist item gets. The reason the trade bundles them is that nobody books a lamp without them.

If you own lighting and the stands are sitting in the same van, listing them takes about two minutes. Also worth reading what the lighting rates themselves look like across four houses before you set a price.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to hire a C-stand in London?

£6 a day for a 40-inch C-stand with arm and knuckle at Shoot Blue, excluding VAT, with shorter 20-inch and 30-inch versions at £4.50 and £5.50. Sandbags are £2.50 each. Budget two bags per stand as a minimum.

How much does grip add to a lighting order?

On a two-lamp setup, about 21% once power is included. Two SkyPanel S60-Cs at £390 need £12 of stands, £10 of sandbags and, off mains, a £58 generator — £80 on top of the lamps, before VAT.

Do I need sandbags?

Yes, and they are the cheapest insurance on the order. A large LED panel on a stand with an extended arm is top-heavy and catches wind. Two bags per stand is the normal minimum, more if the fixture is off-centre or you are outdoors.

What does it cost to power lights on location?

A Honda EU20i portable generator is £58 a day at Shoot Blue, supplied with a full tank of unleaded and a 5-litre jerry can. That is the line that disappears entirely on a mains shoot and reappears at full price the moment you are in a field or a car park.

How much power does an ARRI SkyPanel S60-C use?

ARRI specifies a maximum power consumption of 400W for the S60-C, so two at full output draw 800W. Actual load planning depends on everything else sharing the supply, which is a question for whoever is running power on the day rather than one to settle from a spec sheet.