Lighting outdoors – why and how

Just as lighting the indoors properly with sufficient light is important, so is lighting the outdoors of your homes. In fact, its importance cannot be overstressed. Along with beautifying your home, outdoor lighting is very important for your security. While planning and building your garden or your yard you must keep the lighting in mind, decorating in such a way that your garden makes use of as much light as possible.

Garden lighting

Place your fountains and your décor at places which will benefit from light, that being sunlight as well as the lighting you will install later. One way is to do the lighting beforehand and then decorate later, giving you the best edge to know where your things will look their best. But as with all things, other factors are also to be kept in mind so people tend to do the lighting installation afterwards.

Lighting a walkway and path

If you have a garden with a walkway, it is best that you install lights to illuminate the path. This is important because if your path is lit you and your guests will feel safer and along with that it will beautify your garden and give it the feel of royalty. Walkway lights are of two basic kinds.

Either you can install them as posts at equidistant intervals along the side, or both sides of the walkway. The best post example to use would be ones that look like lamps, with shades on the top. This would help focusing the light down onto the pathway and keep it out of your eyes, thus making the best use of light.

Another advantage of such posts is that they require low intensity bulbs as only the pathways needs to be adequately lit, meaning less power consumption.

Another kind of walkway lights are in ground lights. These are set into globe type containers and are placed into the ground alongside your walkway, facing towards the walkway. These are best when you are looking to avoid installing posts and are a very innovative way of lighting up the walkway. All power cables etc required for these can be concealed underground.

Above: lights in a lighthouse are very specialised with reflectors and powerful light generators, these can be used in the home or a shop as effect pieces

Above: Night lighting of buildings - this one is in UAE

Solar powered lights

Besides the conventional voltage or power consuming lights you can also opt to go green and install solar powered lamps to light up your outdoors. The solar lamps can be used to light up almost anything, your garden, your fountain, your pathway, your swimming pool etc. the same way as ordinary lighting.

The first time expense in installing solar panels to charge your lights will be more but the end result on your budget as well as the environment will be profoundly great. In fact, solar lighting will cost you a onetime installation fee and then you will not have to worry about the bills, because there will not be any power consumption; at all!

Lights outdoors – ground lighting

Another important fact to be taken into account is that the primary objective of outdoor artificial lighting is to light the ground most of the times. Therefore, the lights should face downwards. This helps in installing low voltage bulbs and thus cutting down in power consumption.

Such lights are also environmental friendly in such that they not only save power but also help in reducing the wastage of light by focusing light where it is primarily needed. In conclusion, we can point out that uplighters are totally indoor usage appliances and should not be installed outdoors.

Safety factors for outdoor lighting

One important factor to outdoor lighting is to keep in mind to be environment friendly and keep an eye out for safety. Install you power sources in such places which are safe from dampness and away from the reach of children. Also it is better to keep your power sources for the lighting equipment covered inside boxes.

For example, the lamp posts would require a source close to them. For this purpose an underground ware and tare protected wire should be laid close to the lamps a box should be built with central connections to all the posts.

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lighting outdoors, garden lights, solar, safety >

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