Design Outdoor Lighting For More Than One Purpose

By Matt Adams

There are many reasons to install or update the outdoor lighting around your house. Outdoor lighting is essential to your personal safety and the security of your home. In additions, outdoor lighting can add ambiance to your outdoor living space. Done properly, you may very well be able to achieve both goals with the same outdoor lighting scheme.

Likely the most important function of outdoor lighting related to the security of yourself, you home and your family. Nothing deters unwanted intruders than a well lit location. One of the best and easiest ways of achieving security lighting is to install motion detector flood lights. These can be installed at each corner of your home. These lights can be set at such a level that the odd neighborhood cat will not set them off.

Having a security system of lighting installed means covering all corners of your home, as well as any main entry and exit spots of your property. If you happen to have a party during the motion sensing period of your lighting cycle, you can avoid the annoying on/off cycle by turning the motion detector lights off and just having your ambient lighting on. This means you'll have to turn it back on when your party ends, so that you are protected again.

Even if your security lighting lights up your main entry ways, you might want to add extra lighting to your pathways, or for example the back steps where you take out the garbage every night. Ensuring that your walkways and steps are well lit at night will prevent any tripping accidents that are all too common in unlit areas. In addition to creating a safe travel area at night, these lights will also add some nice ambiance to your yards walk-ways and steps.

As previously mentioned, outdoor lighting is a great way to add mood or ambiance to your outdoor living areas. This type of lighting is not necessarily meant to brighten things up but rather create high lights, low lights and depth to your setting. A favorite outdoor light for aesthetic purposes are the rope lights. Rope lights coiled around trees can be magical. Furthermore strategically placed small spot lights can high light outdoor art.

Adding lighting to your outdoor living space can serve a number of purposes. Whether you want to protect your property, increase visibility for your walkways, or just add some outdoor lighting ambiance, thinking about how all these types of outdoor lighting schemes work together can often result in achieving all of these goals with one lighting design. - 30228

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