Why Use A Professional Outdoor Lighting Company?
There are many misconceptions surrounding professional outdoor lighting and just how much of a transformation it can make to the beauty of your home. If you’ve ever stopped to admire a well-lit home at night or have had the privilege to enjoy the ambience of a skillfully designed professional outdoor lighting system at a restaurant or hotel then you know first hand what effect it can have as our surroundings seemingly come to life at night in a way that daylight can’t capture. Thanks to the tremendous increase in popularity of landscape lighting in recent years, homeowner’s and landscapers alike are considering landscape and outdoor lighting to be a necessity in much the same way as they do with their irrigation system, especially in climates such as Las Vegas where people enjoy the outdoors all year. Many more people, however, live with the regret that they didn’t have the foresight to realize how much more they would enjoy their landscaping if only they had added lights when they installed their landscaping. Fortunately, there are many reasons why adding an outdoor lighting system to your property after your landscaping is established makes a lot of sense.
As a professional outdoor lighting designer, I’d insist that it’s never too late to light up your home and landscaping. People look at my portfolio of work and automatically assume that my systems were installed when the house was built, more often than not that’s not the case. The first couple years after your landscaping is installed is usually the time when your landscaping experiences the most growth it’s after this time that you can most often design a lighting system that requires less maintenance to accommodate plant growth. Thanks to advancements in LED and low-voltage landscape lighting it’s now easier than ever to get power to even the most secluded areas of your property.
When you say landscape lighting most people automatically picture a 10 light kit purchased from your local hardware store and installed in half a day. While there’s no denying the convenience of this type of lighting, today’s outdoor lighting systems are capable of making a much larger impact on your home’s look. From spotlights off a second story eve with a “cool white” MR16 to create a “moonlight” effect, to a well light core drilled into a driveway to light the column between two garage doors, there’s not much that can’t be lit with a 12 volt LED fixture. Thanks to advancements in low voltage lighting it often doesn’t take more than hiding a wire in a drain spout or behind a satellite TV cable to inconspicuously bring low voltage power to your roofline. Running wires under walkways, driveways, or an artificial lawn usually prove to be simple tasks as well
I admit that this type of designer outdoor lighting is often best left to a professional. There’s an art to wiring a whole lighting system without leaving any lasting indication that you were there, sometimes you have to be creative in your installation methods and that creativity often requires some experience and nurturing over time. I recommend spending time learning the different techniques in running wire or asking a lot of questions of experienced landscape lighting professionals or simply contacting us here at Twilight Designs as a way of making sure you’re equipped with the knowledge of what it takes to install a professional looking outdoor lighting system and that you have the tools and know how to meet and exceed your expectations. In our gallery section, specifically the “specialty lighting” section there are a number of pictures, almost all of which contain projects that were installed after the construction of the landscape project in which you can reference a particular lighting theme and ask for insight on how the wiring was run to a specific location.
What about cost? With all this talk about expertise and professional designs, you’re probably running up the tab in your head as you read this and how you can justify the addition of an LED outdoor lighting system to you other remodeling projects or current new landscape renovation. As an outdoor lighting contractor I can’t tell you the countless times a client contacted me shortly after they made a large investment in landscaping, often times this even included altering or adding on to new lighting systems their landscape contractor installed. At Twilight Designs, we’re big advocates for the use of LEDs. They are more costly than their halogen counterparts but after factoring in your savings on materials such as using much less wire per project and the use of a smaller transformer to power a much greater number of fixtures you can recover a lot of the added cost of the LEDs themselves. Using LEDs in our projects not only make sense from a design standpoint but they are much less costly than integrated fixtures as well. Taking those facts into the picture as well as the other benefits that come with LEDs and you can create an outdoor lighting system that requires less maintenance and is more cost efficient to operate.