Lighting your garden can provide you with a peaceful and beautiful place to escape the stress of daily life. After working all day, you can relax in your garden, drinking your favorite beverage, even though the sunset is long past. It is worth discovering the essential steps to lighting your garden because it can make such a difference in your life.
Selecting the proper lighting for the yard can become a bit overwhelming. However, if you have a basic idea of what you would like, then you have already taken the first step to revealing the night’s hidden beauty of your garden.
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With the wide variety of yard lighting, it is easy to make it look glamorous, but it may end up turning your garden into a dry wasteland. You can prevent this situation with careful planning. Of course, you would want to create a beautiful haven for your family and yourself. But, while it is important to get something appealing, it is also important to get the most for your money, labor and time.
Here are steps to help design yard lighting.
1. Ask yourself, why do you want yard lighting.
You might want your garden to be safer and more secure. Maybe you would like a bit of both. Several kinds of lighting can detect movement, including when your car enters the driveway. Motion detectors also add safety to darkened entrance ways that can easily hid an intruder.
You may also desire garden lighting for purely, decorative reasons, like softly highlighting certain precious plants or flowers.
It is possible to combine lighting that serves both security and beauty. Consider illuminating your steps or walkway to avoid accidents and still highlight plants and decorations. As you add lighting to particularly attractive plants, you can extend the light to dark hiding places as well.
2. What kind of power source do you want?
Yard lighting usually is provided by gas, electricity, solar or oil sources of power.
Gas Lighting
Gas lighting gives a soft glow to plants and people. It is well suited for outdoor celebrations. When there is a power outage, it provides a reliable, back up power source.
Electrical Lighting
Electricity offers a lot flexibility. You can purchase many styles of lights to make most landscaping more attractive, while providing safety and security. For example, a Bollard lighting for outdoors uses electrical fittings in regular bollards. Bollards come in tall and short sizes that provide different lighting. It works well for adorning the edges of a driveway or a garden walkway.
To provide soft illumination for patio steps or across the yard, a Step Light is a good choice. These lights can be installed in woodwork or masonry as a long-term fixture. For example, lighting in garden ponds and swimming pools can provide a glowing radiance to the water, making the waves seem to sparkle.
Solar Lighting
Solar lighting has become popular in part, because of how it conserves energy and helps the environment. It uses photocells to charge a NiCad battery in the daytime. At night, the battery provides the power for lighting. It is a simple system that uses almost no wires.
Oil Lighting
Oil lighting enhances the subtleties of lighting as it reflects on the plants and trees. When the weather becomes cooler, it emits a steady, warmth that gently disperses through the area.
3. Make sure the yard lighting is out of harms way.
Your lighting can last longer if it is protected from getting bumped or crushed. Garden or driveway lighting is best installed in places that the electrical cords will not get stepped on or run over. To protect electrical outlets and transformers from various weather conditions, make sure they are covered.
Stronger outside lighting, can be placed on entrance ways, patios, garages and on the sides of the house. Lights can be placed in grass, wood, floor tiles, or in concrete.