Outdoor and Backyard Lighting We Love

Building your home requires your interior designs and exterior elements to blend and work harmoniously. From your floor planning to selections of furniture, what you often overlook is the aspect of your house lighting.

Generally, interior designers suggest that your home should follow the Seven Principles of Interior Design, such as Space, Line, Color, Texture, Pattern, and Light. Among the seven principles, the lighting of a home is the most obvious that highlights all other interior designs. It sets the mood and the ambiance into living spaces.

On the other hand, research suggests that the lighting of your house affects your psychological and emotional status. It reflects your personality and your everyday lifestyle.

Today, most homeowners have agreed that the best features of their landscape design are the outdoor and backyard lighting. From the decorative lanterns to post lamps, your house becomes more attractive for a livable home. To achieve your picture-perfect and stunning house lighting, here are interior design-related tips in selecting outdoor and backyard lighting that you'll love.

What are the three basic types of lighting?

It is a general rule in the principles of interior designing that lightning features should correspond to your setting or function of your room. More often, you choose a single type of light, yet you overlook its suitability and style.

The Lighting Research Center, the world's leading center for lighting and research education, suggests that a house needs to accomplish a great layout by installing three different kinds of lighting in a room, such as the Ambient Lighting, Task Lighting, and Accent Lighting.

Ambient Lighting

Ambient light emits a soft glow, cloaking your room spaces with the right amount of light without causing a disturbing glare. Commonly, photographers use ambient light to produce natural light within a room. Hence, when you decorate an ambient light inside your room, it produces a natural and flat light.

Ambient light is best to use for relaxation and leisure. It is also known as mood lighting, since it scientifically produces soft cures of your face and enables you to dilate your pupils.

Further, there are two types of ambient lighting: the Ambient Indoor Lighting and the Ambient Outdoor Lighting.

The Ambient Indoor Lighting intends to light up your entire room. It balances the levels of space illuminations, ensuring a safe and easy traffic towards the overview of your room. As it emits light, it bounces off the walls to illuminate as much space as possible.

Kinds of fixtures that emit Ambient Indoor Lighting are Chandeliers, Floor lamps, Track Light, Table Lamp, Pendants, Recessed, Track, and Ceilings.

The Ambient Outdoor Lighting provides visibility and heightens security around a building, where it lights up the exterior landscapes, its entrance, and stairs. As such, this second type of ambient light eliminates the risk of injury when having access to the building.

Some fixtures that produce Ambient Outdoor Lighting include Spotlight, Hanging Fixture, Post Lantern, and Wall Lighting.

Task Lighting

Compared to Ambient Lighting, Task Lighting emits smaller yet more concentrated lights. From the name itself, the light is appropriately used for specific tasks, such as reading, cooking, and computer work. In other words, you only need a sufficient right amount of light to accomplish your task using contrast lighting.

For instance, if you want to focus on a specific subject with particular details, using task lights ensures less glare or shadow-effect since it directly concentrates to a targeted angle.

Task Lighting is also known as Office Lighting. The natural and contrasting lights facilitate your brain to focus on more details. That's why most companies use task lighting in their offices to establish an active and dynamic office work through proper lights.

Some examples of Fixtures that provide Task Lighting include Pendant, Tape and Extrusion, Portable or Desk Lamp, Under Cabinet, and Vanity.

Accent Lighting

Some homeowners get confused between accent lighting and task lighting. To properly distinguish, an accent lighting adds style and drama to your home by drawing your eye to a specific focal point. Meaning, it gives an impression to your displayed furniture while shadowing dull areas into a bigger room.

Most art galleries, museums, or even department stores use accent lighting to attract customers. As a general rule, an effective accent lighting requires thrice as ambient lighting provides.

Today, outdoor accent lighting has become a trend to highlight parts of the exterior design of your home or your backyard.

Common Fixtures that emit accent lighting are Track Light, Slimline bar and Undercabinet, Tape and Extrusion, and Wall Lights.

What are the types of outdoor lighting that can transform your home?

During the night, you want to ensure a minimal risk and proper entryway for your family members and guests to your home. Here's where the Landscape Lighting comes in!

More than a housing luxury, the landscape lighting creates a warm and welcoming curb appeal to your home. It adds drama to areas to your exterior designs that don't stand out during the day. While highlighting them accentuates their unique features, it also indicates that your home is safe no less.

Here are some types of landscape lights that you love for your outdoor and backyard lighting:

Spotlight and Floodlights

In most common incidents, some homeowners get confused between a spotlight and a floodlight. In actuality, they have great similar features. However, they only have slight differences in their light projection.

Spotlights cast a more concentrated and narrow beam of light, not wider than 45 degrees. It can range in brightness and the area it covers.

Floodlights aim to have a beam spread up to 120 degrees. It conveys light, which is best to use in guiding a pathway for overall safety and visibility.

Outdoor Post Lights

This kind of landscape light accentuates the pathway to your home and balances tone without overwhelming the floodlights. Outdoor posts illuminate dark spaces on pavements and backyards.

When planning to build outdoor post lights, you need to consider the light's diameter encompassing around the post. Also, you need to determine the height of the fixture corresponding to your landscape setting. By measuring its light diameter and fixture's height, it prevents the yard from looking like an airplane runway.

Inground Lighting

If you have noticed some parks and pavements that have a hidden and circle-shaped fixture installed into the ground often illuminating walkways and driveways, then it is an Inground Lighting you've seen.

Compared to spotlight and outdoor post lights, inground lighting emits a dramatic illumination towards a specific object, for instance, a tree that sophisticatedly lights in an upward beam. The silhouettes it produces casts excellent details.

When you plan for installing an inground lights to guide your driveways for safer navigation, you need to consider the proper vehicular weight ratings of your car. Also, you need to choose an inground light that has an ample weight sustainability.

Path Lighting

Path lights are ideal to accentuate the details of your landscape decor. It is one of the essential fixtures for your outdoor and backyard to improve curb appeal and to increase footpath safer.

As its name implies, path lights produce soft glare, ranging from small solar lights to wall-size lights that need a well-planned connection to the home's main circuit.


How to avoid voltage drop in installing landscape lights?

A voltage drop indicates the voltage loss in transmission between the voltage source and the electronic loads . It explains the amount reduced through resistance. Further, a voltage drop causes overheating of your device, increases your costs and inconvenience, and damages oscilloscope patterns.

That's why, Circulate Specialists suggest that to control voltage drop in low-voltage landscape lighting, you need to follow to steps:

First, you need to invest a multi-transformer. In electronics, a multi-tap transformer provides landscape lighting with multiple terminals with output ranging from 12 volts up to 15 or more volts. The tendency in setting up landscape lights requires long runs, thin wire, and many fixtures on a high-voltage tap, resulting in power loss. Hence, a multi-tap transformer enables flexibility in your input and output requirements.

Second, you need to have a well-planned wiring method to distribute equal voltage to every fixture in your landscape lighting system. Most electricians suggest to apply the "HUB" method, a kind of wiring method that connects the home wire run from the transformer to a HUB. Applying the HUB method is cost-effective and great savings on your labor, since there are no connections in the ground, there is an equal voltage to every lamp, and you can easily add more fixtures in the future.

Key Takeaways

Your house lighting plays a crucial and essential role, especially in your family?s and serenity. More often, house lighting is often overlooked since you used to be comfortable using only a single light for your entire household activities.

However, now you know that there are three basic types of lighting for your house, namely, the Ambience Lighting, Task Lighting, and Accent Lighting.

What makes your house more livable is its landscape lighting. It adds drama to your exterior designs that don?t stand out during the day. Landscape lighting also accentuates the unique features of your landscape decor and ensures that your home is safe no less.

To achieve your picture-perfect and stunning house lighting, here are the following outdoor and backyard lighting we love:

1. Spotlight and Floodlights
2. Outdoor Post Lights
3. Inground Lighting
4. Path Lighting

Make sure to set the mood and the ambience into your home spaces by selecting the right outdoor and backyard lighting.