Tips to a Successful Garden Lighting

When it comes to lighting your water garden, a little goes a long way. That’s because human beings’ eyes need less light outdoors than they do indoors in order to see shadow, light, and pattern. Walk around your yard at night when you plan your outdoor landscape lighting, envision how and when you want to use your spaces, and rely on the tips provided by this article.

A landscape and water garden design should balance the home and its associated hard-scapes. Traditionally during the construction, contractors will start to make trade-offs to trim costs and manage the projects bottom line. And most of the time, the landscape and the lighting have suffered the most damage.

While it is an art to understand how much light to place in a landscape or pond to highlight the desired focal points of the area, garden lighting can be both functional and aesthetic.

There are several things to be considered when you want to light a water feature or pond in your garden:

If you have a waterfall, light it from two directions with fixtures on each side of the fall. To provide depth and softness to the area, use path lighting. Often back lighting of something behind the water surface will surprise you with an outstanding reflection in the water’s surface while underwater lights will highlight the fish as they swim through the light at night but of course, just make sure that your water is clean and clear.

The development of light emitting diode (LED) lighting is one of the most exciting developments for pond lighting and other garden landscape lighting. These lighting fixtures are permanently sealed, and therefore, no water can enter the LED chamber.

Moreover, LED bulbs and diodes have an outstanding operational life time expectation of up to 80,000 hours and you do not need to worry about the maintenance. Plus, unlike other lighting system, LED lights do not have hot operating temperature. LED’s coolness helps maintain the health of algae and other plants that serves as food for your fishes.

Another important thing to consider is the housing of your lighting fixture. Use housing materials made of brass, copper, stainless steel or some of the new composite materials when choosing a fixture to be installed near a pond. Do not use aluminium because it will deteriorate. Cast aluminium is naturally porous and can leak water into the socket housing which may harm to your electrical circuit.

A pond, a waterfall or any water feature in your garden can be more beautiful if you add lighting to bring out the beauty of your plants, fishes or decorative stones. There is something magical about seeing the movement of fish passing underwater lights. However, the number of your light fixtures will not determine its beauty. Just keep your lighting simple and subdued.