Light up your outdoor space with landscape lighting. This adds value to your home and keeps family members and guests safe by illuminating paths, stairs, and driveways.

Highlighting every tree, plant, and column in your yard is tempting, but over-illumination can cause glare. A professional knows your lighting design’s best wattage, beam spread, and color options. Visit https://orlandolandscapelighting.net/ for more details.

Landscape lighting can be done in a variety of ways, so that it enhances your property and adds a touch of artistry. Some techniques, such as silhouetting and shadowing, use strategically placed lights to create unique effects. This technique is often used to highlight statues, a favorite garden flower, or a beautiful tree. It’s a great way to draw the eye to something that might otherwise be overlooked at night. Another creative professional landscape lighting technique is moonlighting, which utilizes a down-facing light to mimic the look of the moon shining down on a patio or walkway. This creates a unique effect and adds an ethereal touch to the evening landscape.

The asymmetrical silhouette of a taller plant or structure is another interesting landscape lighting technique that highlights its unique shape and form. The lacy leaves of a Japanese maple or the cool multiple trunks of your Pygmy date palm can take on a new captivating presence when they are illuminated with a downlight from above or a more dramatic uplighting technique. These unique and artistic approaches to landscape lighting are only one reason why you should work with a professional landscape lighting company.

Beyond aesthetics, landscape lighting also helps guide you and your guests to entrances or areas of interest at night. This is important because if it’s dark and you aren’t familiar with the area, you may end up in the middle of your yard or on the wrong side of your house. By illuminating these areas with appropriate landscape lighting, you can avoid this and safely navigate your estate after dark.

The main benefit of landscape lighting is additional safety and security for your home. Studies have shown that houses that appear deserted are more prone to burglary, so installing landscape lighting can help to deter potential thieves and vandals by creating the impression that someone is home. This is particularly helpful for larger estates that have a lot of open space and can be hard to navigate without proper illumination. In addition, if you have visitors who are unfamiliar with your property, the right landscape lighting can help guide them and keep them safe while they are on your premises.

Safety

Landscape lighting is not just a way to enhance the beauty of your home at night. It can also improve safety on your property.

Well-placed landscape lighting can help prevent your loved ones from tripping and falling, which is especially important after dark. Whether it’s a misjudged step onto a walkway or tripping over the rake, shovel, skateboard, or dog toy someone left on the deck, a fall can hurt and disrupt your day-to-day life. And while you want to ensure your outdoor spaces are inviting and beautiful, safety should always be a priority.

Even if you know every inch of your landscape, it’s easy to trip or misstep in the dark. And a fall can be disastrous, whether it’s a simple bump or a trip to the emergency room for broken bones. Landscape lighting can help to minimize these risks by properly illuminating your walkways, steps, and pools.

Many people mistakenly believe that landscape lighting will look too bright and overpower their space, but it’s really an art form that requires a professional touch. The right balance of lighting levels, focusing on unique features of your space, and using the proper fixture sizes can create a beautiful, safe, and functional outdoor area for your family and guests.

Choosing the correct bulb is also important to maintain the safety and quality of your lighting. Choose bulbs with an IP rating of 4 or higher to protect against water damage. It’s also important to keep in mind that not all fixtures are lamp-ready. Some have an integral fixture that is built into the structure of the landscape, so you can’t change the bulb unless you replace the entire fixture. This is common with driveway lights, but is less of an issue for other types of landscape lighting.

Another thing to remember is that your lighting system is powered by line voltage (120V), so if the wires get exposed to the weather elements, they could pose a risk of shock. However, there are transformers available to reduce the voltage to twelve volts for low voltage landscape lighting.

Energy Savings

The right landscape lighting will illuminate your outdoor living space, making it a place to enjoy after dark. It will allow you to cook outdoors, lounge and dine in your backyard, and extend the hours that your outdoor spaces are usable. It can also help deter crime by illuminating key areas around your home that make it more visible to neighbors and passersby.

The key to a successful landscaping lighting design is to use different techniques that add interest and focus. For example, highlighting is a popular landscape lighting technique that uses multiple lights to highlight a single object or structure in your yard. By using varying distances and angles of the light, you can create a unique focus that brings new life to your landscape.

Another way to use landscape lighting is to illuminate walls, flagpoles, urns and other decorative elements that are part of your landscape. This allows you to show off these features at night without creating unnecessarily bright or glaring spots that detract from their beauty.

You can also create a sense of mystery and intrigue with a silhouette lighting technique. This is achieved by illuminating the backdrop behind a landscape feature like an urn or tree to highlight its shape. For a dramatic effect, you can even highlight a silhouette of your home or other landscape features in the foreground to provide contrast.

When choosing the right landscape lighting for your home, you need to understand how much power it will consume. Getting a professional landscape designer involved early on in the project will give you the best chance of finding lighting options that are energy efficient. They can help you determine the wattage of your fixtures, which will influence how many you can put on a transformer line and how bright they are.

Other ways to save on landscape lighting is by using timers to switch them on and off automatically, which gives you greater control over when your lights are used and how much energy they expend. A daylight sensor is another energy-saving option that can be installed on your landscape lighting system to turn the lights on and off based on the sun’s movement and the amount of natural light available.

Mood

Mood has an incredible impact on our physiological and psychological states. The way your space is lit can dramatically affect how you feel and how you enjoy it. Landscape lighting is an opportunity to create intrigue and drama in your outdoor spaces. Highlighting your favorite features and playing with the shadows that are cast by those shapes can make a simple stone wall or water feature come to life at night.

The use of path and area lights to light up smaller plantings, statuary and other garden elements can create interesting shadowing that highlights the texture of a plant’s bark or a textured surface on a masonry wall or wood shingles. Silhouetting is also a great technique to use on trees. Lighting them from above, washing the branches and ground beneath in light can make your tree look majestic at night.

Creating an inviting atmosphere with well-lit pathways, gathering spots and other key landscape elements draws people into your outdoor space. An experienced lighting designer can help you create the perfect mood to showcase your property.