Nightscaping – Shedding Light On Your Home’s Full Potential
It’s the evening, and shadows stretch out across your lawn, highlighting objects in the foreground against the backdrop of the approaching darkness of the night. What a perfect setting to relax and enjoy the company of friends and family.
Unfortunately, when night falls, natural light provides but a brief window of opportunity to view and enjoy the subtle nuances and elusive nighttime beauty of your home. Fortunately, there is a way to extend and control this short-lived beauty and make it a permanent element of your landscape.
With a professionally designed and installed outdoor lighting system, you can extend the usable hours of your outdoor space, and enjoy that cozy feeling of security and comfort that can only be found at home. After all, your home is your sanctuary. It’s where most of your days begin and end. With lighting, you can create desirable points of visual interest while enhancing your home’s natural surroundings. You can also minimize any safety and security risks posed by a lack of light.
Outdoor lighting amenities are often overlooked in residential landscape designs. Many homeowners are unaware of the many outdoor lighting options available, except for consumer-quality landscape lighting fixtures you find at the hardware store. These are widely recognized and commonly used fixtures. These kinds of fixtures can be less reliable, often plastic and lack the degree of personalization available from a professionally designed system.
Professionally designed and installed low-voltage landscape lighting is by far the most effective, reliable option for outdoor lighting. The minimal operating expenses, longevity of the system and the stunning night scenes that can be created, can not be matched by a kit from the home store.
Low voltage outdoor lighting offers extreme flexibility regarding fixture placement and precise control over the light produced. “Using a professional designer and installer gives you the opportunity to address all your concerns up front,” explains Stan Beatty of York Contractors in Kansas City. “Don’t be afraid to ask for references, and always consider the quality of the equipment your purchasing.”
Beatty suggests that homeowners familiarize themselves with the differences between consumer-quality and commercial-quality components, including the fixtures, transformers and wiring.
“Know what you’re buying,” he says. “Are the fixtures made of plastic, composite, aluminum, brass, copper or steel? It can make quite a difference in the longevity and performance of your lighting system.”
A professionally designed and installed lighting system can simultaneously address multiple demands presented by the specific landscape. Concerns such as increasing security, or adding safety to potentially hazardous areas like steps, stairs or water features. The addition of outdoor lighting, will allow you to enjoy your entire living space both inside and out, day and night.
A professionally designed and installed outdoor lighting system will allow you to uncover the beauty of your outdoor space and discover the complete potential of your home.
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LED Outdoor Lighting – What You Need to Know
LED lighting for walkways and pathways is becoming increasingly popular. Why has this happened and what are the reasons for its growing use in outdoor lighting? Durability along with versatility, energy-saving and cutting down on costs make these a very smart choice for anyone looking for outdoor lighting. This article will explore the 4 ways that LED (light-emitting diode) lights excel over other forms of lighting outdoors.
LED lighting is long-lasting unlike the bulbs we are accustomed to using. They are not easy to break as glass bulbs are because LEDs are made from solid state components. This makes them very difficult to damage with external shock unlike incandescent and fluorescent bulbs which are fragile. Along with being very robust they also provide greater shapes, sizes and colours than traditional lighting methods.
Without using color filters that traditional lighting methods require LEDs are able to emit light of an intended color. They can very easily be dimmed either by lowering the forward current or with pulse-width modulation. You will see them in outdoor message signs such as scoreboards and warning lights which gives an indication of versatility. For gardens the shapes, sizes and colors are almost unlimited. They are also economical to use.
Outdoor LED lighting uses approximately ninety five percent less energy than the older style of glass bulbs. Also, because these bulbs last for years energy is saved lowering replacement costs and maintenance. LED light bulbs use only 2-10 watts of electricity. Small LED flashlight bulbs will extend battery life 10 to 15 times longer than with incandescent bulbs. The cost savings by using LED outdoor lighting can be a major bonus.
The difference in longevity of an incandescent bulb compared with an LED bulb is huge. A two-watt LED bulb will last approximately sixty thousand hours whereas a sixty-watt incandescent bulb will last approximately one thousand hours. LED bulbs last up to 10 times as long as compact fluorescents and much longer than typical incandescent bulbs. Because the electricity costs can be reduced by 80% or more many cities in the US are replacing their incandescent traffic lights with LED lights.
Some of the advantages of LED have been looked at briefly. To sum up it has many attributes that make it a good choice for outdoor lighting such as durability, cost-cutting, energy-saving and versatility in shape, size and colour.
Lighting Outdoor Spaces – The Benefits
Lighting outdoor spaces around your abode adds charm and value to your property. Few things display to the world just how much you care about your property than well chosen and well located lighting outdoors. Traditional lamp posts and porch lights certainly have a place in an outdoor lighting scheme, in the present day there may be a lot more which can be done to increase the unique elegance of your property and garden.
Whenever lighting outdoor areas pay special attention to your garden’s most attractive attributes. Although you may keep your garden very simple instead of lush and manicured, lighting outdoor pathways adds a welcoming glow and noticeably beautifies the area. Upward facing floodlights in the edges of your house provides indirect lighting that visitors will appreciate while they make their way to your home. And if you have a long driveway, drive over lights placed at intervals could make it much easier to navigate at night.
Lighting outdoors doesn’t need to be a high priced task either. Most of today’s outdoor lights can come fitted with motion detectors (especially welcome for security lighting) and sensors that turn lights on in the evening and back off at dawn to ensure you don’t waste energy illuminating your garden throughout the daytime.
To further improve the safety of your house, illuminated walkways, motion-sensor security lights and lights included in brick stair risers are great options. You may also choose to brighten up particular botanical features of your garden or water features giving them a fairy light glow. Adding lighting out of doors really showcases your home’s beauty adding charm and greatly increasing the “wow” factor.