Is your landscape lighting suffering from a lack of imagination? Do you just have a floodlight or two outside your home that suffices for lighting your home at night? Accent lighting is an essential part of any outdoor lighting design, so if this sounds like you, listen up. You yard doesn’t have to be boring! In fact, no matter what size, shape, or style of yard you have, you can install some great looking accent lights that will make it pop out compared to your neighbors at night. And this doesn’t even have to cost you an arm and a leg to do! There are several low-cost, high quality vendors that you can obtain all sorts of different outdoor lights from for a fraction of the price that you would expect to pay in a traditional brick and mortar store.
What Is Accent Lighting
In short, outdoor accent lighting is a form of lighting that highlights objects and areas of your landscape with subtle lights and inconspicuous light fixtures. There are many different areas that you can apply LED accent lighting to, and almost every landscape has something that can be lit up at night. Some of the most popular objects on landscape to use accent light on are large trees and shrubs, flowerbeds, paths, statues, ponds, fountains, and even bird baths. In fact, anything that you think is special or that stand out on your property can be used at night in conjunction with accent lights.
Properly Installing Accent Lights
When you’re using accent light, the main focus is supposed to be on the object, not on the light fixture itself. For this reason, the lamp will be doing most of the work, and the fixture is really just around to hold it in place. Try to hide your light fixtures as much as possible and for the best results buy fairly inconspicuous light that will blend into your landscape. If you have trouble running wires to the right location you can always choose to install solar accent lighting, which is easier to install and allows you to place the lights anywhere there’s a sunny patch on your landscape. Remember the lights are supposed to be subtle as well, so you should only install a few, well-placed, low-level lights as opposed to brighter lights.
You have several different ways that you can install your lights as well and each creates some cool effects. Up lighting is the most popular, which is just placing the lights placed below what you want to illuminate and shining the lights up onto the fixture. Down lighting and cross lighting are also popular, which is placing the lights either above or to the side of what you want to light. Another very stunning way of adding accent lighting is back lighting. This is placing light fixtures behind an object and shining them at it. This creates a silhouette that, depending on what you decide you light, can look anything from amazing to spooky.
Accent lights are great for use on decks and patios as well. On these areas, the accent lights are used to help to set a mood and provide some general lighting. Ideally, you want to have low level lights that are close to the ground and embedded in the railings or placed in the stairs. This gives you enough light to see where you’re going, but it doesn’t provide enough to attract bugs and moths from all around and ruin the nighttime atmosphere.
The Best Accent Lighting
There are many different types of garden lights that you can use for accent lights. Outdoor track lighting works especially well because once you install the track you and place the lights anywhere you want, giving you a degree of flexibility to change the look of the lights. The problem with them is finding a place where you want to install the track!
Spotlights are a better option. Garden spotlights can be placed nearly anywhere you want to place them and can be moved around at least fairly easily if you change your mind on how you want your lights to work, especially ones that are staked into the ground. They work great for any type of accent lighting, just make sure that you find the right wattage ones as spotlights come in varying different intensities and not all of them are useful for accent light.
If you have the time to install them and want to really give your property a professional touch, recessed, or well, lights are possibly the best solution for accent lighting. These lights are actually placed into the ground or other structures in the environment, completely hiding them. This means that installing them in a little bit harder, but for applying up lighting there are few fixtures that do a better job.
Installing outdoor landscape lighting is a great way to brighten your landscape and add a touch of beauty and class to it that would otherwise be missing at night. And finding and installing these lights has never been easier. Searching online will let to find numerous great merchants that supply these lights and others to you for a fraction of the prices that you will find offline.
