Outdoor lighting enhances the beauty of your home, trees, foliage and
property. It provides functional lighting for adjacent social
spaces such as porches, patios and decks. It makes your
home safer and more secure as well. For all of these reasons,
outdoor and landscape lighting is an investment that will
add value to your home.
Decorative Outdoor Lighting. Coach
lights should be used over and around your garage. They are quite
likely the first thing that visitors to your home after dark will see.
You can complement them with post lights in your yard, or either at the
edge of your driveway or at the end of your driveway near the street.
For light at your front door, you can match the coach lights with
a hanging or flush mounted pendant over the entryway or front
door.
Security Lighting. The
decorative lighting should be done first and then supplemented with
functional security lighting such as flood lights on each corner
of the house, recessed cans in the soffit of the garage and landscape
lighting to illuminate dark areas around windows and bushes.
Landscape Lighting.
Landscape lighting is installed on the ground, in trees, and on
decks and building exteriors. Most residential landscape accent
lighting is low voltage light powered from a central transformer.
Because it must withstand extremes of weather and temperature is
uses specialty fixtures and wiring. Because one lights landscape
in a low light environment, wattages are generally lower than those
used indoors. The primary landscape fixtures are accent lights,
in-ground uplights (to shine on walls and trees), spead or path lights,
deck lights, and flood lights.
Most landscape lighting is controlled with timers or photocells or motion sensors.