laser levels

[Bill Wright]

Recommendations please! I need something that will work outdoors, range only 10m max, mainly for concrete, drainage, etc.

Bill

[Andrew Gabriel]

Picked up a self-leveling one from Aldi on impulse a couple of weeks ago, and used it a couple of days ago. Worked fine. I don't have experience of any other one to compare with though.

[Dave Liquorice]

They'll all work out doors but how waterproof (rain) or how easy the spot will be to see in daylight, let alone sunlight is another matter. B-)

Unless you're talking km rather than m the range won't be a limitation. Beam divergance and atmospheric scatter affect the useable range neither of which become significant at a few tens of metres.

You may have to pick a dull day, dusk or night and use white target cards to find the spot and transfer to something fixed. I don't think you stand a cat in hells chance of seeing a spot that has been diverged into a line during the day. The virtual line of a flying spot from a rotating one might be ok.

[Chris Hogg]

+1

Unless you've got a particularly powerful (and blindingly dangerous and probably illegal) laser on it, seeing the spot in broad daylight is quite difficult.

[John Rumm]

There is quite a variation in ease of use... The simplest ones are like a normal level with a laser pointer on the end. You need to manually level them up and point the spot.

Next up are the rotating ones - they have a spinning turret the projects a dot around a circle. These are better for setting out in gardens etc as once levelled the spot will come to you, and being a spot rather than a line are still quite bright.

More expensive ones are self levelling.

The top end ones are the line projecting ones. These are typically self levelling (you need to get them roughly level (say +/- 4 degrees), and they they project horizontal or vertical lines. Very good for setting out tiling, or anything else that needs to be level all round a room. I treated myself to one of the Bosch pro models last time I had a whole room to tile. Very pleased with it.

[Tim Watts]

For outdoors, something with a detector for your application I would have thought.

If you need a visible line (eg brickwork), you'll be needing a green laser to have much chance and ideally a rotating green dot laser.

But for testing the height at various points, a system with a detector stick would probably work best - you don't need a visible line - it will tell you if you need to be a bit up or down.

[Harry Bloomfield]

John Rumm presented the following explanation :

Not a Bosch, but the same idea and I got it cheap. It produced H or V, or both and it was much more accurate than I could measure the error. Unfortunately and after a few years the H beam failed. You could go right around a room with it, marking it in sections for level and it would meet up perfectly when you got back to start point.

[Andrew Gabriel]

This describes the Aldi one I got recently. it was £22.99.