Outdoor Landscape Lighting - What You Need to Know

Outdoor landscape lighting is a different kind of lighting in that it provides accents to the surrounding areas around your home, e.g., your exterior walls, garden, and even trees. In general, there are two types of outdoor landscape lighting. These are Accent Lighting and Utility Lighting.

Accent Lighting

Accent lights for outdoor landscape lighting serves one purpose, and that is to shine a directional light on architectural features, structures, and shapes of your home or garden. These are commonly used to light up the surfaces of outer walls in your property, or else in pools. Sometimes, you can also put little outdoor lamps on the aisle leading to your threshold, giving your home a nice warm and welcoming nightly look.

By its very name, this type of outdoor landscape lighting highlights the features in your outdoors. You can make your walls look dramatic at night by shining yellow warm lights on them. You can also highlight the grass on your lawn, or if you have an outdoor garden fountain, you may focus your outdoor landscape lighting on this.

Utility Lighting

This type of outdoor landscape lighting is different from accent lighting because it is used to flood an area with light. Such types of lighting are outdoor spotlights. These are more powerful types of lighting than the accent lighting.

Utility lighting is often used on top of door entrances, the sides of the house, and other places where you need ample supply of light in the night. Utility lighting is usually installed on the ceilings outside your house.

CFL versus Incandescent

Choosing the hardware for your outdoor landscape lighting is very important. You need to find out which lights consume less energy, and which lights give off brighter lights. CFL is the more environmental kind of lighting compared with the incandescent light because it consumes less energy and lasts longer. It also has brighter lumens than the incandescent.

CFL is cheaper to maintain because they last longer, and will cost you less in terms of electric bills. However, they are only popular for indoor use, and there arent many outdoor landscape lighting that use CFL because of its limited lighting designs and colors.

LED Lights

LED lights on the other hand, is another type of green lighting, just like the CFL lights. However, they are more flexible in terms of applications and usage. They are also longer lasting than CFL, and consume much less energy. However, the hardware is a little more expensive than the two previously mentioned. Many architects and designers prefer LED lights with outdoor landscape lighting because they need very little maintenance, and do not consume very much electricity. LED can be used for both Accent Lighting and Utility Lighting.

LED lights are a very good investment if you are thinking of installing outdoor landscape lighting around your home. You can look for design options for outdoor landscape lighting online. Look at pictures of homes with this type of lighting, and ask your designer if this is possible to have the same set-up in your outdoor area.