Most outdoor LED failures I get called about are not electrical. They are chemical, and they start in places nobody photographs for the brochure.
A promenade screen I looked at last spring had been up for nineteen months. The picture was still bright. What had gone was underneath: four module screws had swollen their holes, the bottom row had a tide mark of dried salt inside the cabinet, and the gasket along the lower edge had gone flat enough to pass a fingernail. Nothing had "failed" in the sense of going black. It had simply started a clock that ends with water on a PCB.
IP65 is where most coastal specs stop, and it is the least interesting number on the sheet. IP65 is a jet test with fresh water, from one direction, on a new sample. Salt air does not behave like that. It arrives as aerosol, it deposits as chloride, it sits in the gap between a module and a frame, and every night the metal cools faster than the air and pulls condensation into exactly the crevice you cannot inspect. The failure mode is not a splash. It is a wet film that stays wet.
So if you are buying for a seafront, a harbour front, or anywhere the wind carries spray two blocks inland, the useful questions are not about the IP number. They are about five specific parts.
Fasteners. Zinc-plated screws are the cheapest thing on the bill of materials and the most expensive thing to fix, because rust jacking lifts the module off its seat and then the seal has a gap. Ask for 304 stainless as a floor and 316 near the water. Ask whether the screws are the same grade as the brackets — mixed grades create a galvanic pair and the cheaper one loses.
Gaskets. Compression set is the whole game. A gasket that takes a set at 60 °C in July will not seal at 5 °C in January. EPDM ages better than most and survives UV without chalking; cheap PVC foam does not. Ask for the gasket material by name, not for "waterproof".
Power supplies and receiving cards. These sit in the driest-sounding place in the cabinet and are usually the first electronics to go, because conformal coating is the line item everybody trims. Coated boards survive a wet film. Uncoated boards grow a green fringe on the joints within two seasons.
Drainage. Coastal cabinets collect water. The question is whether it leaves. Weep holes at the lowest point, a bottom edge that is not a flat tray, and a module plane that tilts a degree or two off vertical so water runs instead of pooling. If the bottom row of modules sits in standing water, that row is a consumable, and you should price it as one.
Service access. A facade screen four metres above a public walkway is not a place you want to bring a lift every time a module needs swapping. Front service means one person, one tool, from the pavement side, without closing the walkway or booking a crane. This is a maintenance decision disguised as a hardware feature, and it matters more by the sea because you will be back more often.
There is a cheap habit that catches all of this early: a twice-yearly walk with a torque driver and a phone camera. Photograph the bottom row, the four corner modules, and the inside of one cabinet door. Corrosion is a slow, visible process, and the photo from March tells you whether the one from September is worse. Most sites that lose a screen to salt never looked inside the cabinet once between commissioning and failure.
None of these are exotic. They add a small percentage to the cabinet cost and remove a much larger percentage from the ten-year bill. The trap is that a coastal tender usually compares two bids on luminance, pixel pitch, and price per square metre, and all three look identical on paper. The difference shows up in year two, in a photo of a swollen screw hole that nobody wants to send to the client.
We build the AS6 outdoor cabinet with 316-grade stainless on the exposed fasteners, EPDM gaskets, a coated PSU compartment, and a module plane that drains rather than holds — details on the AS6 page: https://www.mlxled.com/product/as6-outdoor-led-screen/
If you are specifying for salt air, the honest summary is: treat IP65 as the entry ticket, then spend your attention on metals, gaskets, and drainage, in that order. The screen that survives a coast is not the brightest one in the tender. It is the one whose screws are still the same shape in year three.
I work with MuenLED. #MuenLED
One question I keep having to answer on site: would you rather pay for 316 stainless throughout, or keep a coated steel frame and budget a re-coat every five years — which one would you actually sign for on a seafront facade?
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