There is no one answer to what the best garden deck lights for your home will be. However, if you couple a few of these highly recommended fixtures with the information below, you’ll end up with great lighting outside your home that all your friends and family will enjoy!
Choosing Great Deck Lights
With all the options that you have for deck lighting, it can get hard to find the fixtures that won’t just light up your deck but have it make a dramatic impression on anyone that sees it. But, by taking it step by step the whole process gets a lot easier and more manageable. The first thing that you have to do is draw up a floor plan of your deck. In the plan you should highlight stairs and pathways leading to and from the deck, sitting and congregating areas like tables and bars, task areas like grills, and any nice features that you have around your deck.
A Word on Solar Deck Lights
One important decision that you will make is whether or not to install solar deck lights. Solar powered lights have several advantages, they’re easy to install since they won’t require running wires and they won’t draw any power from your home, but just choosing solar lights will severely limit your choices of lights that you can use on your deck. Properly running and hiding low voltage wires can be a bit of a pain depending on the lights you install, so think about using these lights for smaller special parts of your lighting system instead of the whole thing. You’ll have better overall results with your lighting this way.
Stair Lights
Now that you’ve drawn up your plan, you need to provide lighting to the different areas that you highlighted. Start with your outdoor step lighting. These lights are very important to prevent trips and falls especially if you have senior citizens or young children in your house. Stairs lights should be small and unnoticeable but they should also give you enough light to make sure that you can see the stairs safe at night.
These lights can be installed in the stairs themselves, in a block or planter to the side of the stairs, or even on posts. Your stairs don’t have to be seen from space, just make sure to give them enough light people can see where they’re going.
Lighting Sitting and Congregating Areas
For lights around sitting and congregating areas, you have several options. If you just have a few tables, outdoor table lamps or patio umbrella lights (don’t worry, they work on your deck too) do a great job of giving you enough light to read, eat, or play cards by. If you want to have your lighting make more of a statement, you can use solar string lights in these areas as well. You can use the string lights to edge around bars, tables, and railings or you can string it from ceilings or along walls. You can find string lights for any occasion and any price range, so you’ll definitely be able to find one that will be at home on your deck.
The main focus when you are installing garden decking lights is to create a nice, ambient atmosphere. Provide enough light so that people can see each other’s faces, but not so much that you are attracting every moth within an ten mile radius. LED deck lights work great for this because they are long lasting, low on energy consumption, and many don’t even attract those pesky insects.
Task Lighting
Areas that you plan on using for grilling, cooking, or even mixing drinks should usually have a little bit more light to them than congregation areas. Depending on what you plan on doing this can be as simple as putting a single light on these areas or you could even install outdoor flood lighting. When you install these lights, make sure to make it to a separate switch than the rest of your deck lights so that you can turn them on and off individually as you need them.
Feature Lighting
Finally, you can consider feature lighting. Feature lighting is used to highlight features in your landscape or garden. Features can include trees, shrubs, flowers, statues, trellises, pools, fountains, ponds, and any number of other fixtures that you want to add some flair to at night with accent lighting. Garden spotlights work great for this type of lighting and you can aim them in almost any direction to get the effect that you want. Try up lighting, down lighting, cross lighting, and even backlighting until you’re satisfied.
Knowing the different areas of your deck that you have to light is only part of the battle, now you actually need to find the fixtures that fit! But don’t worry, these discounted bestselling fixtures are all a great way to start lighting up your deck, and you can even qualify for free shipping!
