Light Up the Night with Landscape Lighting
Add ambience and security to your outdoor living spaces
so they’re ready for summer’s alfresco
entertaining.
Story by Dan Weeks
Outdoor lighting can really make a house come alive,” says
Jule Philpot, Mr.
Electric®
franchisee of central Kentucky. “Most people
are shocked to see how good their home looks when
it’s nicely lit.”
Your home’s architectural features can be
highlighted as well as showcasing trees and ornamental
plantings. Lighting welcomes and guides visitors
to your door; converts dark spaces and shadowy
corners into inviting living areas; denotes paths,
decks and driveways; and defines entries and eating
and entertaining areas. A well-designed outdoor
lighting plan can dramatically increase your
home’s
security by helping to prevent nighttime falls
and missteps and by discouraging prowlers.
The best way to add lighting to your home’s
exterior and yard is to work with an outdoor lighting
expert to design a comprehensive lighting plan that
takes ambience, safety and security into account.
There are two general types of exterior lighting—landscape
lighting and safety and
security lighting.
Landscape Portraiture
“With each house, we try to create a living
portrait of a home and its landscape,” Philpot
says. The difference is—well, like night and
day.
Landscape
lighting adds beauty to your yard, garden
and outdoor living areas by highlighting architectural
surfaces, lining walkways and steps, delineating
patio borders, highlighting features in flower and
rock gardens and illuminating garden ponds, decks,
swimming pools and statues.
There’s a practical side to all this beauty
as well. “As we do lighting projects, we often
find ourselves creating outdoor entertaining areas
that people didn’t even realize they had,” says
Jim Foltz, Franchise System Manager and Senior Service
Professional for Mr.
Electric Corp. “If you
have a pond or waterfall, for instance, we can add
some lighting to that area, and it becomes a new
focal point. Add some lawn furniture, and you’ve
just gained a new outdoor room.”
Here are a few of the types of lighting
fixtures available:
- Walk lights are
mounted on low stakes beside driveways, walkways
and garden paths. They use tiers and shades to direct
their light downward, enhancing safety, minimizing
glare and making them ideal for outlining large landscape
features as well as for lighting walkways.
- Landscape floodlights direct
light upward at a controlled angle. They’re perfect
for illuminating statuary; highlighting landscape
features such as walls, fences and outbuildings or
architectural surfaces such as your home’s
exterior; or for shining upward toward ornamental
trees. “I particularly like well lights,” Philpot
says. “They’re a type of floodlight
that installs flush with the ground, so they virtually
disappear in daylight, and they work wonders to
highlight the texture of your home.”
- Landscape spotlights work in
the same way as landscape floodlights, but have
a narrower beam. Spotlights can be used to illuminate
house numbers, small statuary or other small but
important landscape features.
- Surface and deck lights mount
directly onto walls, fences and decks. They provide
lighting around steps, benches, railings, pools,
spas and more.
- Solar-powered lights are easy
to install—just stick them in the ground and
they turn themselves on at dusk. They’re
fine for lining walks in sunny areas, for example,
but light output is limited in brightness and duration
and varies with the seasons and weather.
Generally, low-voltage landscape lighting systems
are your best choice for dependable, secure illumination.
These lights are powered by a transformer that runs
off your home’s electrical system. The transformer
reduces the voltage supplied to the lights to a safe
level, so that people and pets are not endangered
by high-voltage wiring. Low-voltage lights also operate
at a fraction of the cost of household-current lights.
When installed in lawns, the electrical cables are
buried in a shallow trench running from fixture to
fixture. When installed in gardens, cables may be
buried in a shallow layer of mulch to avoid disturbing
the root structure of plants.
Spotlight on Safety
“No robber likes to cast a shadow,” Philpot
says. He notes that 80–90 percent of break-ins
occur to homes that have no exterior lighting beyond
the usual front and rear porch light and perhaps
a carport or garage light. Foltz agrees: “Outdoor
lighting attracts people’s attention as they
go by, making the home much less attractive to intruders.”
While all landscape lighting has some deterrent
effect, some types of lighting are specifically designed
to discourage prowlers—and welcome guests.
This type of lighting provides bright, overall lighting
of yards, entryways and driveways, or lighting of
porches, decks and recreational areas. You can choose
from the following lighting options:
- Adjustable floodlights are designed
to mount high on a wall and illuminate the space
beneath. You can choose from single- or double-headed
versions, both of which allow the head or heads to
be aimed. Different angles of coverage are available,
including some lights that can be mounted on the
corner of a building to illuminate areas adjacent
to both walls.
- Light sensors turn fixtures
on at dusk and off at dawn, while adjustable motion
sensors turn the lights on if motion is detected
(many sensors allow you to fine-tune the sensor
angle and the duration of illumination after motion
is detected). Two-level illumination combines the
two features, turning the lights on at low power
from dawn to dusk and operating them at 100 percent
power when motion is detected.
- Fixed position wall
lights are
more decorative in appearance and, as with interior
wall-mounted fixtures, are designed to illuminate
an outdoor “room” such as a deck, porch,
entryway or eating area. Unlike interior lights,
however, outdoor wall lights are weatherproof and
designed to survive temperature extremes.
Worth the Effort
Outdoor lighting is one of the most dramatic and
trouble-free enhancements you can make to your home. “I
do a lot of free lighting demonstrations, so people
can see what their own home will look like after
we’re done,” Philpot says. “They
can’t believe the difference.”
Dan Weeks recently installed new motion-sensitive
lights in his backyard. He loves ’em, but his
black cat, Midnight, complains that the lights blow
his nocturnal cover.