Planning for Successful Landscape Lighting

With a myriad of options available in outdoor landscape lighting, folks often find themselves making some common mistakes. These can result in a miserable failure in your attempt to accomplish an attractive, inviting landscape lighting scheme. The good news is that the mistakes are easy to avoid if you know what to look for and follow a careful plan. So let's get you started on the right foot to creating an attractive, inviting atmosphere.

Plan, plan and then plan some more. Taking the time to inventory your garden for the best items to light and best techniques to use in lighting them will leave you with a quick and easy installation effort. At the very least, it will be quicker and easier than had you not taken the time to plan. An important thing to remember as you plan is that not every plant, tree and decoration in your garden needs or deserves to be lit by garden lights.

As you plan, pay as much attention to what you DON'T want to light as you do to what you do want lit. Beautiful landscape lighting is as much about hiding or "shadowing" less desirable items as it is about highlighting those items you want to pop. For an object to pop, its surroundings have to recede into shadow. In planning what you want left in the dark, give some thought to what kind of lights you'll need to accomplish that goal (usually spotlights) and what kind of accessories you may need (such as louvers).

Avoid overdoing it. One of the most commonly repeated mistakes made by amateurs is using too many outdoor lights. As stated above, you want to select items worth calling attention to and your results will be far more pleasing to the eye if you adopt a somewhat conservative approach. If you find yourself waving off incoming international flights at night, you've overdone it.

Allow for yard maintenance. Not only must you keep the power cable in mind as you plan your design to allow for future planting or digging, but you should also keep mowing and general maintenance needs in mind. The placement of a spotlight might result in the best lighting but make mowing a real pain. Where necessary, consider recessed landscape lights as an alternative to above ground or post lights.

If you are restricted by a budget, landscape lighting kits may be an acceptable solution but you should know their limitations. I've written considerable information on the pros and cons of landscape lighting kits but, in short, you often save money with kits because they are made of plastic. That means they also use lower wattage bulbs. Saving money with a light that is inadequate for your needs really represents not savings at all. However, for some applications, plastic landscape lighting kits are perfect and you can also realize some savings with brighter metal landscape lighting kits.

Be sure to allow enough power for your lighting needs. Landscape lights and landscape lighting kits by companies like Malibu include a power pack appropriate for the number of lights in the kit by watts-per-light. If you don't go with a kit and want to cobble together a variety of lights, you'll need an appropriate power pack to feed them juice. The power pack reduces the street power coming from a 120-volt GFCI plug to a wattage appropriate for the number (and wattage) of lights you are trying to power.