Take Advantage of the Season With Fall Landscape Lighting

Fall is here and we’re soon going to see it in all its glory. That means we’re going to see more color as the leaves change color. The heat is giving way to the cooler times, letting us enjoy time outside more. It’s also going to get darker sooner. What better time to update your landscape lighting? Take advantage of your fall landscape lighting to enhance the curb appeal of your home by exploiting autumn’s natural beauty. Here are some tips and ideas for you to try.

1. Create Ambiance For Fire Pits

People use their fire pits more in the fall. While the fire pit will provide some light while it’s burning, it does need some lighting around it. You don’t want big floodlights with wide beams, though. You want softer lights to add ambiance that won’t take away from the light of the fires you set. Floating feature lighting, like we talked about previously, is perfect for this. It gives a clear view of the area from a distance without destroying the ambiance.

2. Highlight The Changing Trees

The colors of the leaves is the most distinctive and recognized part of the season. Your fall landscape lighting should aim to highlight that. Playing around with different lighting styles can really amplify the natural autumn beauty of your trees. Try different kinds of uplighting and downlighting at different temperature levels of light to get different effects.  You can create some really striking and eye-catching visuals with the right mix.

3. Bring Warmth to the Cold

While fall still has its warm moments, the evenings get chilly. Bringing a sense of warmth to the cold nights can give your home strong curb appeal. Use warm lighting for your entertaining areas. The glow will make these areas seem like an island of warmth in an otherwise cold night, inviting the eyes as well as your guests.  That extra warmth and light can help you fight the winter blues, as well!

4. Take Advantage of the Dark

While darkness can seem scary and foreboding, you can use that feeling to create strong contrast with your warm lighting. A softly lit patio can become an island of warmth and friendliness, enhanced by the darkness around it. It also makes for great romantic ambiance to enjoy with your loved one as you curl up in a nice blanket to watch the stars.  It’s as cozy to look at as it is to experience.

5. Get Your Safety Lighting

Too much darkness can be a bad thing.  If you haven’t set up good lighting for your paths, now is the time.  As the deeper darkness of the fall and winter take over, that’ll be more time where you’re left unable to see where you’re going. These lights will also help you see patches of ice that might build up, protecting you from injury caused by slipping on it. Get your path lights installed now so you won’t be bothered by the darkness when you come home late at night.

Don’t Forget The Maintenance

While the changing leaves can be quite beautiful in the autumn, it’s a signal that the leaves are about to fall. Autumn winds may also knock branches off your trees. When these things happen, they can obscure your lighting. Worse, they could potentially become a safety hazard. If the leaves dry up, the heat generated by the lighting fixtures may be enough start a fire. Don’t forget to remove any that fall on or near your lights.

Now Is The Best Time For Fall Landscape Lighting

Fall is the best time to make any adjustments to your lighting that you’ve been planning on. You can now see what the longer nights will look like and adjust your lighting to match. Don’t wait too long, though. Once fall moves into winter, the cold hardens the ground, making it more difficult to install fixtures and bury cables.

Here at Portland Sprinklers and Landscape Lighting, we are experts at lighting design. If you want to set up your fall landscape lighting to take advantage of the spectacular autumn season, get in touch with us today. We’ll set you up with something stunning!

Gorgeous Landscape Lighting

Lighting is important when it comes to seeing where you’re going. It has great value for security. These are the practical aspects of landscape lighting, but you shouldn’t neglect the visual appeal, either. Landscape lighting can make your home a stunning sight. If you need the lighting for practical reasons, there’s no reason you shouldn’t also make it gorgeous. How can you manage this? Well, let’s take a look at some options.

1. Take Advantage of The Darkness

Features that look great in the day can be completely invisible at night, even if they’re large. If there’s a feature to your home that’s a large part of its curb appeal in daylight, you can make that a major focal point at night. During the day, people will see everything in your yard, but landscape lighting can make the best features stand out. Do you have a fancy retaining wall? Landscape lighting makes it grab people’s attention. Have you worked hard to get your trees looking beautiful? Spotlighting can show them off while the scrub around it fades from view.

Use your landscape lighting to make the best features stand out so that anyone seeing your house at night will only see the absolute best your home has to offer.

2. Light All The Trees

If you decide you want to highlight your trees with landscape lighting, it’s a good idea to highlight all of them. Highlighting only some of your trees will produce large areas of strong light and spaces of empty darkness. Those large spaces are more noticeable for the contrast with the highlighted areas, creating an ominous feeling that can ruin the visual appeal.

For large yards with many trees, this isn’t always necessary. You can focus your lighting around your home, highlighting the areas that draw attention to the house and let things fade out as you get further away. Depending on how trees are spaced, there might be other unique designs that can be effective, but that’s more situational. For average sized yards, however, highlighting all the trees is generally more advisable.

3. Floating Features

Darkness isn’t always scary. Properly used, it can be your best friend. If you have a particular feature that’s relatively isolated from others, you can use LED strip lights in recessed areas underneath the feature to create a soft glow underneath it. At night, this creates the illusion of the feature floating in its space. This kind of striking visual design is great for decorative fire pits, benches, and similar features. It creates a welcoming atmosphere without any need for overhead lighting.

4. Ambient vs. Direct Lighting

Landscape lighting isn’t just about shining a bright light on something you want people to see. Even spotlights spread light in an area around where they’re aimed. The extra ambient lighting can be used to great effect. It’s central to the floating look we just mentioned. In that case, the direct lighting is hidden underneath the feature so that all you see is the soft ambient light spilling out.

This ambient light can be used to provide enough light to see as well. If you factor it into your thinking, you can use direct lighting to draw attention to features, then use the ambient lighting to let people see where they need to go without drawing attention away from the features you want people to look at.

5. Water Features

Water features, such as pools, fountains and decorative ponds can add a lot of value to your home’s visual appeal. With good landscape lighting, they can sometimes add even more appeal at night than during the day. Waterproof lights placed under the surface of the water feature can create a glowing pool effect with an inviting, magical quality to it. For fountains with decorative features, you can use the floating trick to catch the eye, combined with spotlights to keep them focused on its decorative qualities.

Swimming pools can also have the same effect. Just remember that people actually in the pool will have a much lower line of sight than someone walking around. Avoid bright lights shining directly towards the pool to avoid blinding people in the water. Good use of ambient lighting can make it a magical experience, whether you’re looking from afar, or going for a nightly dip.

6. Planters

During the day, planters are a great way to add a splash of color to your home. At night, they can double as lanterns. Using LED planters can create a glowing spot of color that not brightens up your home in more ways than one. The color will liven up the night and also draw attention to the area around your house. Try placing a few around the facade of your house and see what you get.

7. Welcome Visitors With Your Garden

If you’ve got a front garden you’re proud of, the right type of lighting can make it a stunning display at night. It will welcome your guests and create a comfortable ambiance that’s visible from the street. Combined with strong path lighting, it also makes for excellent security, as it lights the area around your home. It will be harder for anyone to get to your home without being seen, discouraging burglars from the attempt.

8. Step Lights

Stairs are a major hazard in the dark. There’s no shortage of stories of people coming home at night and stumbling on the stairs because they couldn’t see them.  Lighting them up is pretty much essential for safety, but consider step lights instead a lantern or porch light. Soft step lights built into the concrete create enough light to see by without a harsh, centralized light source. It’s more inviting as well, improving your curb appeal.

Landscape Lighting Enhances Your Home’s Beauty

Landscape lighting is all about making the best features of your home stand out. With good planning and proper light selection, you can create a visual striking image of your home and yard at night. There’s no end to the ways you can improve the curb appeal of your home when you know the right way to light it up at night.

At Portland Sprinklers and Landscape Lighting, we’re experts at this. We use high quality, energy efficient LED lights to bring your home to life. If you really want your home to stand out from the rest, then don’t hesitate to get in touch. There won’t be a single person who passes by without remarking on the gorgeous sight.

Lumens: A Better Measurement

When you think of bulbs, you probably do so in terms of wattage. That’s how bulbs are labeled, after all. More watts means more light, right? Well, no, actually. You see, wattage is a measurement of energy use, not light output. When all we had were incandescent lights, watts worked fine as a measurement, but technology always changes the playing field. LED lights – of the sort we install with our landscape lighting – can give off the same amount of light as an incandescent bulb for as little as 20% of the wattage. So, to say how much light fixtures give off, wattage is a really bad way to judge. That’s where we get lumens.

But What Are Lumens?

The dictionary definition of a lumen is as follows: “a unit of luminous flux in the International System of Units, that is equal to the amount of light given out through a solid angle by a source of one candela intensity radiating equally in all directions.” In other words, lumens measure how much light is increased in the area the light spreads. It’s all quite a bit technical in the specifics, but all you really need to know is this: lumens measure brightness, wattage measures energy efficiency.

Getting the best value out of a light fixture is having a good ratio of wattage compared to lumens. The lower the wattage and higher the lumens, the better the light is. LEDs easily outclass all other types of lights in this category, making them the least expensive, longest lasting, and brightest lights you can get. That’s why we use them for all our fixtures. As a sample comparison, a 100 watt incandescent bulb will give off 1600 lumens. A 22 watt LED bulb will give off the same amount. Put into numbers like that, the correct choice is obvious.

How Many Lumens Do You Need?

Home Depot has a list of recommended lumens for specific types of lights. It reads as follows:

• Step lights: 12-100 lumens
• Hardscape lights (on walls): 50-185 lumens
• Landscape lights: 50-300 lumens
• Path lights: 100-200 lumens
• Landscape spotlights: 120 lumens
• Lamp posts: 120-180 lumens
• Pond/pool lights: 200-400 lumens
• Motion sensor lights: 300-700 lumens
• Flood lights: 700-1300 lumens

These are standard recommendations, however, and don’t consider particularly darker areas, or specific instances where you want more or less light. Generally speaking, the amount of lumens you want should be determined by how and what you’re trying to light up.

1. Ground Level

For a simple, one story house, with small shrubs, bushes, hedgerows, and sidewalks, around 80 to 120 lumens is usually recommended. With the right angle of beams, this lighting can give you enough light to see by and spread that light evenly around. The aim is to give cohesion: evenly spread light without any harsh glares.

2. Second Story Stuff

If you’ve got a second story house and you want to light up the second floor, 140-180 lumens is recommended. This can help light up spaces between 10 and 20 feet high. This level of lighting can also light up medium sized trees, or be used to cast striking shadows for artistic effects.

3. Mansions and Moonlighting

If you have a house with three stories, you’re going to need around 230-270 lumens to pull it off. To get this effect, you usually rely on uplights, well-lights, and spotlights. These will get you lighting on the upper stories of your house. They also provide good grazing light for the front of larger homes and mansions.

This level is also used for “moonlighting.” By placing lighting fixtures at this level at 20 to 30 feet in the air, you can create an effect that mimics natural full moonlight in the area below. It creates a great ambient lighting effect for people who want something a bit more romantic and interesting. The effect can also be achieved with level 2 lighting, but it’s usually this level of light that best achieves the effect with the least amount of planning and effort.

4. Tall Trees and Extensive Estates

Anywhere from 350-1000 lumens will fall into this category. It’s very rare for private homes to require this much light, except in very specific circumstances. These kind of light levels are reserved for lighting up very tall trees and very tall homes with four or more floors (generally up to 70 feet high). You can also use it to highlight features of tall houses, like chimneys, or other rooftop artistic displays.

Mix It Up

These four different light levels don’t act as a single fix for any situation. Generally, each level of light is used for different purposes. This means to get the best lighting effect for your home and landscape, you really want to layer the lighting. Use higher levels of lighting to achieve specific effects, while the lower level lighting gives you light to see and highlight the general features of your home. With good mixing and matching, you can create astounding, breathtaking effects for your landscape lighting.

Let Us Help!

Landscape lighting is one of our specialties! If you’re looking to get some good landscaping lighting up for your house, we know all the tricks. You can talk to us for advice on the best way to light up your landscape, or you can ask us to come out and help you set it up. We’ll help you get the best lighting set-up you can for what you want it to do. Get in touch today and see what we can do for you!