Essential Tips For Success With Garden Lighting

Where garden lighting is concerned, there has never before been so much choice available at such affordable prices. But buying the kit is only one part of the story. If you want to end up with attractive and functional landscape lighting there are a few other aspects to consider.

The single best way to ensure a successful outcome is to undertake upfront planning. Decide what type of lighting you want and where you want to install it. Making these decisions early informs everything that follows. A lighting scheme without planning invariably looks haphazard and disjointed, with different types of power supply, uncoordinated fittings and obvious compromises.

Once you have decided on location and basic styles, for example deck lights and lanterns hanging from the pergola, then it’s time to settle the solar versus low voltage cable issue. The main differences can be summarized as follows: solar wins when ease of installation, flexibility and access to power are concerns; low voltage cabling is the clear winner for brightness, control and long term maintenance costs (no rechargeable batteries to replace).

You can of course mix and match to good effect, with solar patio lights cheek by jowl with low voltage deck lights, but it is still best to plan it all out first and buy compatible units from the outset.

If you decide to install some amount of cabled 12v lighting, then you also have to choose between LED and conventional incandescent lamps. You cannot mix these two types of lighting on the same circuit. LED landscape lighting cables must be connected to an LED driver and incandescent (halogen, for example) bulbs attached to a circuit powered by a regular 12 volt transformer. Get this wrong and you’ll burn out your lights and transformers in short order.

Finally, don’t overdo it. The single biggest mistake most people make (other than failing to design a plan of course) is over-lighting their garden. The point of landscape lighting is to create a different look at night – two gardens for the price of one – not to simply make it look just like it does during the day but with bright lights acting as a poor man’s sun.

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