For homeowners, a house is one of their most significant investments. Making sure that your home is beautiful inside and out is essential. When the sun sets and darkness prevail, you don’t want your house to fade into the night as well. Don’t allow the evening to prevent you from enjoying backyard activities or hide the true beauty of your home.
Installing great outdoor lighting is the best way to keep the outdoors well-lit while enjoying activities such as swimming or grilling after dusk. Additionally, proper outdoor lighting can boost the overall outdoor ambiance and protect your property from unseen dangers. When it comes to lighting installation, several reputable service providers, including https://oregonoutdoorlighting.com/, are worth checking out especially if you want to learn more about the suitable kind of outdoor lighting for your home.
Benefits Of Outdoor Lighting
Depending on the type of house you have, whether it’s a small cottage or a modern mansion, outdoor lighting should be a priority due to the several benefits it provides, such as the following:
- It increases the safety of your home during nighttime. Aside from allowing you to move around your yard quickly, it can also prevent crimes such as burglary.
- It allows you to stroll or navigate through your yard during nighttime.
- It exudes a warm, inviting welcome when family or guests drop by for a visit.
- It highlights and adds drama to landscaping or architectural elements in your yard.
- It creates comfortable and communal surroundings such as an entertainment area with a fire pit as the centerpiece or a defined seating space where the family can gather.
- It makes outdoor activities such as entertaining guests or grilling easier at night.
- It boosts the overall curb appeal of your property. This is an advantage that makes your home a lovely space for various purposes. In case you decide to sell your house in the future, the lighting will truly play a vital role.
Remember that you have to consider different outdoor lighting options—safety lighting to deter potential prowlers or invaders, landscape lighting to highlight your lawn’s features, and accent lighting that features the hardscape. If you want to learn more about the outdoor landscape lighting and see an example, watch this video:
Generally, if you want to achieve varying lighting levels depending on your specific needs, it might be best to include these types of outdoor lighting. Remember that within each of these categories, you will find various lighting choices available. Let us delve into several outdoor lighting ideas to make your house stand out functionally and aesthetically.
- Security Lighting
Security lighting provides the brightest light source on your property. The main objective of security lighting is to illuminate vast areas in your property to scare off potential burglars or any destructive animals.
In most cases, security lighting has a 120-volt current, which is the standard. Remember to position the illumination on elevated areas such as the eaves or the garage. You can focus the broad light beams over the backyard entrance or walkways in this position.
If you want the ideal outdoor lighting for security purposes, it might be best to select motion-detecting floodlights you can mount on the exterior walls or siding. Choose a model with a housing unit that can accommodate three bulbs that turn on once the built-in sensors detect motion in the area. The bright light it emits will expose potential prowlers and make them believe the owner is at home and on alert even when they’re not around.
- Path Lighting
When you have a garden with stone walkways, it’s vital to have proper outdoor lighting for you to move around effortlessly and enjoy its beauty at night—you wouldn’t want to trip on stones and random objects in your way while strolling. Path lighting offers soft to moderate lighting for the landscape to allow safe navigation through walkways or paths while highlighting them.
You can install this type of lighting on the ground throughout both sides of the main walkways; starting at the back entrance to the fence door, around flower beds to highlight the contours, or along the ascending stones from the main footpath to a backyard element.
Nowadays, you can find low-voltage path lighting with solar LED options, usually including a decorative bulb housing unit affixed to a short stake that you can insert into the ground. In case you’re planning to get the low-voltage path lights, you need a transformer to lessen the current from 120 to 12 volts.
As for the energy-saving solar models, you no longer need extra wires. Although the walkways are under the shade, the lights can remain intense several hours after sunset. This can be made possible with a remote solar panel that you can position in various locations to receive direct sunlight. It may also be powered by rechargeable batteries.
- String Lighting
If you want to achieve a rustic ambiance in your outdoor deck or garden, you can consider adding string lighting. String lighting provides low-voltage and mellow lighting that gives off a warm atmosphere suitable for entertaining guests. You can suspend string lights in the outdoor space where your gatherings will occur, such as the eaves to illuminate the outdoor kitchen, or on the post of an outdoor gazebo or pavilion to highlight the patio furniture.
It would be best to search for rechargeable, waterproof, battery-powered, or solar-powered string lights that include a remote solar panel, especially those with durable LED bulbs. By choosing these models, you no longer need to use extension cords for the yard. It also allows you to illuminate far corners of your property that don’t have accessible electrical outlets. The light fixtures will continue to function even when exposed to the rain.
- Wall Lighting
In most cases, the outdoor wall lighting is low-voltage and works both as safety and accent lighting. It is the best option to improve navigation and illuminate small and shadowy areas on your lawn. Wall lights are mountable on vertical surfaces, such as around sunken seating areas along with the interior of the pergola, above stairways, pools, and other low-lying areas in your outdoor space.
If you want one that provides the right amount of light on recessed areas, you can go for wall sconces with an open-base design. In case you have limited space on the exterior walls, you can use semi-flush mount sconces as an alternative. With this, the light attaches to a slender stem that secures itself to a plate on the wall.
- Deck Lighting
Deck lighting typically has standard voltage. It produces soft to high-intensity lighting to help you move through the deck at night, accentuate adjacent garden elements, and minimize tripping hazards and visual clutter. In most cases, you can install deck lighting as a chain of LED lights buried into the grooves on the surface. It allows you to walk safely over them. You can also position the deck lights around the deck surface’s perimeters, along the deck stair railings, or in between the stairs’ steps.
- Spotlighting
Spotlighting or up-lighting is a kind of outdoor lighting that produces narrow, moderate, or high-intensity light beams forward, usually to showcase an ornamental feature, plant, or tree. You can install these outdoor lights at or above the ground beneath tall trees or a lawn ornament to give off a statuesque appeal.
When illuminating tall elements such as trees, you should select bullet-shaped light fixtures with a base that you can push into the ground with a built-in stake. In most cases, bullet light fixtures have adjustable heads resting above the ground and generate bright beams of light over farther distances at your chosen angle.
If you want to illuminate shrubs or bushes in your yard, you can try installing well lights, which are rounded lights that you push into the ground. They cast light over short distances. Since these lights are embedded into the ground, they allow small garden elements to stand out.
- Lanterns
An accent outdoor lighting that you may also consider is lanterns. Lanterns emit soft, low-voltage lighting that works best in accentuating the architectural décor or details in your yard. You can install lanterns near the back door to highlight a transom window or arch in most cases.
A majority of lanterns come in semi-flush mounts, including a glass and metal exterior attaching an arm to the wall’s plate. Nevertheless, tabletop lanterns that run on batteries can provide the same visual interest to the eye level while adding soft illumination to elements during garden dinners, including the snacks or beverages on a table. It would be best if you go for translucent lanterns instead of those with a clear-glass covering to generate diffused, glare-free lighting that is neither distracting nor dim to the eyes.
Conclusion
When it comes to outdoor lighting, you have a variety of options to consider. These will make your property attractive and functional at the same time. You can choose one from several outdoor lighting ideas as enumerated above.
Using various types of lights, whether for security, highlighting the landscape, or accentuating the garden elements, have several advantages that are definitely worth the money. Once you have the right lighting in place, you can make your lawn a safe, attractive, and enjoyable space to bond with family and friends for years to come.
