by William Rogers
Lighting up your home and landscape has become steadily more popular in today’s market. This is true for three principal reasons: to showcase the architecture of the home and landscaping, to extend the time to enjoy their outdoor living spaces safely once the sun begins to go down earlier, and added security,
Dramatic display – Up-lighting and the separation of your home from the shrubs and trees 
around your home showcase the architecture of your home. Down-lighting within trees can provide a soft, moonlit effect. And lighting the features of your landscaping: retaining walls, water features and fire-pit seating areas for example, improve safety and can add real value to your home.
Increased use of outdoor living areas –Once fall begins its approach, landscape lighting will extend the time to safely enjoy your outdoor living spaces as the sun sets increasingly earlier and earlier.
Security –Many of us enjoy the look of bushes near the house. However, every police officer will tell you that bushes close to the house provide cover for someone trying to get into your house. Lighting these areas provides increased visibility and consequently, security.
Halogen lighting was once the standard of the industry for both the cost-effectiveness and reliability over incandescent. But in the past couple of years, LED lights have become the standard for landscape lighting. A halogen light system requires annual bulb changes, a higher level of maintenance and significantly more power to operate. While LED fixtures are initially more expensive than halogen, the smaller wire that is used (as a result of less power being transmitted), cost-savings on overall power usage, and the required maintenance on halogen systems make LED the most cost-effective option in the longer term.
Halogen and incandescent bulbs include filaments, which glow hot when current passes through them to provide light. This leads to two characteristics that make them less efficient than LEDs: heat, which makes no light but uses a lot of power, and filaments that become brittle with use and lead to eventual failure when they break.
With no filament to break or burn out, LEDs can last 40,000 hours, approximately 20 years of regular use, compared with just two years for halogen bulbs. LEDs are also extremely efficient, sipping 1 to 11 watts of power versus 20 to 60 watts for halogens. That means lower installation costs due to smaller transformers and cables, lower operating costs, and reduced maintenance, for up to a 50-percent savings over halogen systems in the course of 15 years.
LEDs have one significant drawback, their high initial cost. They can run about $40 per bulb, compared with about $5 for a similar halogen. Also, many LEDs have a cold blue light with a color temperature around 6,000 K (kelvins). The hotter a flame is the bluer it is. Look instead for a warm-color temperature, about 3,000 K, which most closely resembles the color of sunlight. And don’t forget to look at light output, in lumens, to make sure you’re getting enough brightness.
Many of us have thought about the brightness of a bulb in terms of watts. But today, most bulbs, whether halogen, LED or incandescent, are rated by lumens. Here are a couple of guidelines about lumens. A 100-watt incandescent puts out about 1,600 lumens, while the same brightness for an LED bulb would only use 23 watts. That’s where the cost savings comes in to play. The LED bulb uses about 1/4thof the power. Also important to keep in mind is that different manufacturers produce higher or less efficient bulbs, so looking for the lowest watt-usage bulb for a given lumen rating will increase your savings.
One final note about halogen lights that may be important: they can be extremely hot, exceeding 400 degrees F. In your garden, your plants need to be considered, and anywhere the fixtures are exposed could be dangerous to children and animals. LEDs on the other hand, emit very little heat and can often be touched without consequences. Considering all of that, why would you want halogen bulbs? Their biggest advantage is sheer power. Anywhere you need a lot of power to illuminate a large area, halogen might be your best alternative.
Landscape lighting tied in with home automation is now widely available. With the ongoing immersion into IOT (the internet of things), many manufacturers now offer an add-on to the transformer to connect the lighting systems through your Wi-Fi network. This provides access through your smartphone to control zones, brightness and colors of lights, on/off times, vacation settings and many more options. Imagine being able to change your lighting to your team colors when the gang comes over to watch a game!
Some of the very latest systems even provide control through Amazon’s Alexa, or Google Assistant and Apple Home-kit to control your lights with voice commands when you’re home.
To get the very best advice about when to install outdoor lighting, and how it should be done to achieve the best effect, get your landscaper involved very early in the process. This field can get very technical very quickly, so it’s a good idea to involve a professional from the start. They can help you make the best choices to utilize the latest in equipment technology most effectively.
Here at (your company), we have all the latest equipment, knowledge and experience to get your lighting project done right. And we provide all maintenance necessary to keep your lighting operating at peak efficiency. Give us a call and we’ll be there to make sure you get the effect and functionality you need.
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