Outdoor flood lighting is one of the most versatile types of lighting you can use in your landscape. It can be used as security lighting to deter criminals, you can use it for deck lighting to make sure that you can use your deck or patio during warm night, or they can even be used for accent lighting if done correctly. Whatever you’re planning on using your outdoor flood lights for, make sure to get the best fixtures for you and your home. Here are five of the best that you can find for your money.

Malibu 3-Pack Solar Outdoor Flood Light Set

The first light fixture is a three-set from the people at Malibu. This kit comes with what you need to get your landscape lighting plans started. There are three light fixtures that are powered by LEDs that provide amazingly bright, white light. Best of all, you know they’re easy to install. They’re solar powered so there are no wires to run. All that you need to do is stake down or mount the light (both of which are included) and place the solar panel in a sunny patch. When they’re fully charge, the lights provide up to fifteen hours of power, meaning they’ll last through even the darkest winter night. Check out the full review

Copper Lighting Portable Motion Activated Floodlight

If you want to beef up the security around your home, there is no better way to do it for cheap than is a motion activated flood light. It scares criminals off and decreases the chances that you will be the victim of a home invasion. This model from Copper Lighting works great as a everyday floodlight that will keep your home safe, but it’s also portable, giving you a whole lot of different possible uses for it. The attached motion sensor detects motion up to sixty feet away and 180 degrees around the fixture. It also comes with a 100 watt halogen bulb.  See what it can do for your home.

MAXSA Innovations 40225

If you’re not kidding around about your home security, and who is, the light from MAXSA Innovations is right up your alley. The light itself is a triumph of modern technology. It is solar powered, so it draws all its energy from the sun, but it’s also incredibly bright. The 80 LEDs, which never need changed, inside of the light put out the equivalent of a 40 watt hydrogen bulb, but without the extra heat and energy usage. The light comes installed with a motion detector to help out with security lighting and is incredibly easy to install.  Start keeping your home safer today.

FL30 Floodlight

This light is the third in our group to be attached to a motion sensor. The light comes with two attached light fixtures which can be mounted in any direction that you choose. The included motion sensor can grab movement 140 degree around it and is also adjustable, so you can determine how you want the light be behave. If you’re only looking to put up one security light, this package is for you.  See the full review.

Malibu 4-Pack Low Voltage Floodlights

Our last outdoor flood light is another great product from Malibu. This pack is powered on a low-voltage current instead of by solar power. Four fixtures, fifty feet of cable, and even a low voltage transformer are included in the package. This light package is incredibly versatile and is great for many uses, from deck lighting to security lighting.  Read the review and get started with your project.

Outdoor flood lighting does a great number of things for your home. It can keep your home safe , add a degree of beauty, or provide a lot of functional light. Check out our recommended light fixtures to make the most out of your garden lights.

Exterior wall lights are a very popular option for use in any garden lighting scheme. Installing them not only keeps you a little safer a night, but it also brightens up your home, preventing it from getting the drab, dark, dreary look many places that don’t use exterior home lighting have. But because they are so common, they also need to be used appropriately. Once you’ve found the lights you want to install, use these simple tips to make the most of your wall lights and make your house sparkle at night.

#1: Recessed Lights Give A Modern Style To Your Home

Instead of going for the more traditional scones, you can try to recess your wall lights into walls or pillars to give your home a sleeker, more modern feel. These are usually installed as up lights. The effect you get is pretty amazing, it appears as beams of light highlight your home. If you install these lights properly and are creative, you can even change the color of the bulbs once in a while to just change up how your home looks or get in a festive spirit. Imagine just changing a few bulbs to light your house completely up in green and red instead of spending hours stringing Christmas lights. Careful where you install these lights though, you don’t want a bulb shining right into a bedroom window preventing you from getting rest at night.

#2: Scones are Popular for a Reason

Scones are the most popular type of wall lights, and for good reason. They come in many different styles and sizes. They can range from looking sophisticated and vintage to looking sleek and postmodern, so there will always be a style that you can use for your home. They also put off a lot of light, making them ideal for use on the sides of homes where you need a lot of extra light so that you can see.

#3: Install Scones in Key Areas

When you’re putting scones up on the side of your house, install them in key areas. Remember, when making a garden lighting design plan, less light is more. You won’t want to have lights up every 5 feet all along your home. Instead install your lights in key areas such as the front door, garage, or at a porch entrance. These areas all are places where you will need to see for various reasons, and the ambient light from the fixtures will light the surrounding areas as well.

#4: Install Scones in Pairs

One of the most important design tips for using exterior wall lights is to install scones in pairs. By installing scones in pairs you promote a feeling of symmetry and no light looks like it’s out of place because it has a partner. Think about the last time you were at a date party and someone showed up alone while everyone else had a pair. How awkward and out of place did that person look? Don’t make your exterior lights into that guy.

Designing garden lights is a big undertaking, but fortunately exterior wall lighting is fairly simple. Install the lights were you need the extra lights and always place them in pairs. Remember, you want to strike a balance between the light that you need to get tasks done and ambient light that casts a soft glow.

Path lighting is one of the few essential tasks that you have to accomplish to properly light up your landscape.  Garden path lighting not only increase your yard’s beauty, but they also improve safety by preventing trips and falls over unseen hazards that may lay along the most traveled routes around your house.  To properly design the lights so that they are functional, attractive, and fit in with your current garden light plans, there are several things that you should pay attention to.

First, all light fixtures are rated using different measurements, but if you can find ones that are rated in candle feet it will be much easier to determine where to place your lights.  Candle feet will tell you how much light the fixture gives off and it’s easy to interpret this number.  Candle feet are how wide the circle of light that the light gives off will be.  So if a light is rated at 20 candle feet, it should make a circle of light twenty feet in diameter from where you place the fixture.  If you have a light rated like this, you know you should place the lights about twenty feet apart so that their light overlaps a little bit and there are no gaps.

When you actually place your lights, the best place to place them will be in flowerbeds, not in the lawn as many people do.  Placing your path lighting fixtures in the lawn could result in them being run over by the lawnmower at worst.  At best, its going to make a massive headache for you every time you try to mow when you have to navigate the mower around them and then possibly break out the weedwhacker so that you can cut down the grass right next to the fixture.  It’s a big headache that’s easily avoided with a little be better placement of your lights.

Finally, when you’re placing your lights, consider putting them on alternating sides as you go down the path.  This looks more natural and lets the lights overlap while avoiding making your paths look like runways for incoming aircraft.

Designing your garden path lighting isn’t as hard as putting together the rest of your outdoor landscape lighting, but it is very important that you get it right.  Making sure your lights are properly spaced apart and give your paths good light will help make all the parts of your property more accessible and safe.  If you install your lights wrong, you end up with dark or dim spots in your garden lighting pattern just where you need them the brightest and these dark areas can include any number of tripping hazards, like a child’s mis-placed skateboard or other toys that become really hazardous late at night.

If you have an area outside your home that needs both ambient light, but also needs some spotlighting, look no further than a light fixture that has been popular for use in kitchens for years, track lighting. That’s right, track lighting has been used inside many houses for years to provide light in kitchens and other areas of the house, but it can work equally well outside to light up things like decks and patios. If it’s done right, installing outdoor track lighting can add a great deal of visual appeal to your garden lighting plans.

If you’re not familiar with it, traditionally track lighting has involved putting light bulbs inside of something that resembles a soup can on a metal track. These lights provided a great deal of good light, but they also were not much to look at. However, track lighting fixtures have come a long way in recent years with many different attractive styles and designs being available and some even incorporate new LED lighting technology.

The biggest advantage to having track lighting installed is that because the lights are installed on a track, they can be adjusted at will. This allows you to change the direction of the lighting and even the light bulbs and fixtures themselves to suit your whims. You can even add or subtract the total number of lights that are on the track. With other more fixed lights, especially with fixtures like recessed lights, changing the direction and style of light can end up being a long, drawn out affair. But with track lighting these days are long gone. On top of this, track lighting all offers a combination of providing both ambient and focal light, making installing outdoor flood lights for highlighting and then other lights for ambient lighting unnecessary in many circumstances.

If this weren’t enough, installing track lights is a snap. First, and most importantly, make sure that the outdoor track lights you are installing are made to be used as outdoor lights and run on a low voltage current. If they are not, you could end up with a fairly big safety and shock hazard on your hands. Once you have bought the actual track and light fixtures, you need to find a base board that you can mount the track on. This can be purchased at nearly any home improvement store. Mount the track onto the base board and mount the baseboard to where you would like the track lighting to go. All that’s left to do is stick the light fixtures into the track and you’re all done. It’s as simple as that.

Most track lighting is installed on the underside of roofs; however there are instances where it works very well when installed vertically on walls. Because of this, outdoor track lighting works best when lighting decks, patios and pools, when it can be installed either in covered ceilings or up in your eves that overhang a portion of your patio. Around pools, it will even keep your family safer, preventing people from falling in when your solar swimming pool covers are on.

Track lighting is a great addition to any landscape lighting plan. It helps to give as much light as you want, when and where you want it with a minimum amount of hassle. It may not be the absolute sexiest option on the market today, but it is one of the most practical and useful.

Lots of time and preparation goes into any plan for installing outdoor garden lights. There’s hours spent designing the layout, shopping for the exact right lighting fixtures, installing the transformer, and running wires. However, once all of these initial steps are done, some people just turn their lights on at night and forget about them. They sit outside all year with no attention until their performance suffers and they don’t shine as brightly or effectively as they once did. However, with the right tools and a minimum amount of time, you can keep your lights shining and looking as great as they did when you first bought them.

The first thing that you can do to keep your garden light the envy of everyone who visits your home is to clean them once every three months. To make this easy, just try to clean your lights once a season. This will get rid of all the dirt, pollen, and other kinds of grime that will inevitably become stuck to your lights. If you don’t clean your lights regularly, this grime becomes harder and harder to scrub off when you do get around to cleaning them. In the meantime, your lights will lose much of their luster because they have to shine through a hazy of dust on the bulb. You will be doing yourself a favor in the long run by making sure they stay clean by using a bottle of Windex and a few paper towels four times a year.

When you’re cleaning your lights, you should also make sure to check the cords and other electrical cables that you have running to the lights. Make sure they aren’t frayed or damaged in any way. While outdoor lights run on a very low current and the danger of electrocution is low, a bare wire can still give you a jolt, especially to younger children. This also prevents against the wires completely fraying and leaving you in the dark at an inopportune time.

Another concern is making sure that the cords running to your lights are either buried or out of sight. Make a thorough inspection of this once every three months, but also try to keep an eye on it throughout the year. Loose cables can be tripped over by children and even yourself, leading to not only skinned knees, but possibly also pulling light fixtures from their brackets and breaking them. Pets may also chew on the cords, damaging them and maybe even shocking your pets. Protect your family by making sure to keep the cords out of sight.

Finally, if you live in an area that gets a lot of snow every year, you should consider bringing your garden lights inside, perhaps storing them in portable closets, during the winter. This will prevent them from getting damaged or crushed underneath the snow and ice and will also prevent you from not seeing them and inadvertently stepping on them through the snow.

Outdoor garden lights add property value and curbside appeal to your home. However the lights and the electrical system that runs power to them needs upkeep even after they have been installed. If you do do the required maintenance on your lights and the lighting system it will be shining as bright as the day you installed it for years to come.

One of the necessary finishing touches to any well maintained property is the use of outdoor landscape lighting fixtures. Landscape lighting increases the visual appeal of your house and the functionality of much of your land and it brings your property value along for the ride as well. Designing lights that will take both you and your neighbor’s breath away on a nightly basis is not hard. You just need the proper planning and installation to get it done right.

Decide On Your Outdoor Landscape Lighting Theme and Fixtures

When it’s viewed at night without any lights, your landscape is almost like a blank canvas that you can draw anything on. The first thing you must figure out is what type of mood you would like to set with your outdoor landscape lighting. To do this, take a walk around your property and night and try to figure out what you could be doing after dark and what you would like you and other people around to feel like while they’re doing it. Maybe you want your deck to have an island theme for when you have cookouts or maybe you want to give some of the trees a spooky, almost surreal feel with long shadows. Let your imagination run wild with the possibilities.

While you’re doing this avoid the mistake many homeowners make and try to only choose one theme to light your house in. One theme will give everything a consistent feel that can be built on, but if you try to mash together too many themes in a tiny area, you will end up with no theme at all and just a lot of tacky lights. Pick something and stay with it. If you want to go to a different style, you can always change lights out later.

After you’ve decided what general theme you want to employ, its time to decide on the different outdoor landscape lights and lighting methods you would like to employ. Start first with how you would like to light the paths on your property; these can range from driveways to actual walking paths through your garden. These are the easiest lights to decide on and so should give you a great starting point. After you’ve decided on your path lighting style, try to decide how you would like the entrances to your house lit. After the entrances, move to deciding the lighting style for the large objects in your landscape, such as large trees, shrubs, pools, and facades. Finally, figure out the accent lighting for smaller areas and objects on your property. Start with the easiest and largest things to light and work your way down.

While you are doing this, it might help to either sketch out a picture of your landscape and draw in the lights, or if you’re really talented, take a picture use a computer program such as Photoshop to do much the same thing. This will help you get a better overall picture of how your landscape will end up looking once the lights are installed.

Things to Keep In Mind While Designing the Lights

While you’re trying to sketch out the lights you would like to use on your property, try to have a specific task in for each bulb you are trying to place. Are you place lights here for security or are they just to make sure people aren’t tripping over the stairs? Different tasks will need different bulbs and different features to accomplish what you hope them to.

If you are aiming for accent lighting your garden while placing your outdoor landscape lights, try to create some dramatic touches if possible. Do this by playing with the different shadows that object throw off. Try moving lights around and placing them at different heights to give you different looks.

Finally, one other very important thing to keep in mind when planning your landscape lighting scheme is how far away your lights will ultimately be from the transformer if you are planning on using low voltage landscape lighting. You transformer will turn the normal 120 volt current electricity into 12 to 22 volt power that will not shock people out in your lawn. However, the downside to this that the further away from the transformer you run power cords, the dimmer your lights will be. This needs to be taken into consideration as well.

By using these design tips and other creative landscape lighting ideas, you will be well on your way to creating the outdoor landscape lighting that will be the envy of the entire neighborhood. Just make sure to do your research and start planning today!

There are many different potential ways to light up your garden and property at night. Garden light can be the paints that you use to color the dark canvas at night to any way of your choosing. However, if you’re not particurally artistic this can be an incredibly intimidating prospect. Luckily, there are several basic steps you can use to draw out an effective plan and then some general rules to follow so that your lighting plan turns out to be the tasteful and impressive style you want that increases your property value and adds to the curb appeal of your home.

Initial Garden Light Design Steps

As with almost everything in life, if you are trying to install the perfect lights for your garden, lots of planning is essential. Try to start by making a sketch of your property. Emphasize the largest structures and try to imagine what adding different lights and lighting styles would do to them. Alternatively, if you’re more artistically impaired but computer literate, take a digital photo of your property and open it in Photoshop. In Photoshop you can apply a filter to the image to make it into a sketch and print it out, saving you time and lots of drawings of stick figures. If you’re really good at Photoshop you can also add different filters and effects to show what your garden would look like when its darker and then add light effects at different angles to simulate the effects of light.

When you’re first trying to decide where to put lights, start with the pathways leading to your house and through your garden. Decide which style you would like to have these lit in. From this, figure out how you would like to have the initial entrance to your house lit up. Then, decide on the ways you would like to light the larger structures in your yard. From this you should be able to figure out the smaller accent lights you would like to use for smaller structures and plants.

Now that you know the general steps in drawing up a garden light plan, you can incorporate several basic rules of design to make sure that your lighting plan is the envy of the neighborhood.

Try to Use the Minimum Amount of Light You Can

When you’re designing your garden lighting plans, the temptation may be to bathe everything in a ton of light. This is the number one design mistake most budding gardeners make. Instead, opt for a less is more approach and try to simulate the light level you might experience on a cloudless night under a full moon. Avoid doing things such as using outdoor floodlights to light an entire area of your garden. Use the weaker light to accent your garden and particular plants or structures, such as an old tree or your favorite flowerbed to really draw attention to them and bring them out at night. Choose the bulb you will use for each purpose that its supposed to serve. A bulb for backlighting a tree for instance, will be much stronger than the mushroom bulbs you might place along paths.

Try to Include Water

If you can, try to include water into your garden as part of your lighting plan. This can be with the use of a small pond or even something as simple as a birdbath. You can play with the reflections of the lights you install off the water or even just use it as a place where moonlight and starlight can be reflected. Whatever way you decide to use it, water is definitely a great element to add to any garden light design.

Hide Your Light Fixtures

If at all possible, you should be able to see the light given off from your light fixtures, but not see the fixtures themselves. There are some exceptions to this rule. Sometimes you may want to show the light fixtures, such as if you’re using lanterns to create an old-fashioned feel and other times you simply may not be able to hide the lights. One thing you do not want to do is overuse decorative lights in your garden or lawn. Save the decorative lights for Christmas, when you can place loads of giant lit-up Santas on your lawn, but don’t place a plastic frog or gnome with a light inside every fifteen feet.

Use Solar Lights To Eliminate Hassle

If you want to cut most of the hassle out of lighting your property, consider using solar garden lights. These lights require no wiring and you literally stick them in the ground and forget about them. No need to worry around installing the right transformers and keeping the wires out of sight.

For all the hassle that they save, the major downsides you need to take into consideration. First, because these lights need to have a solar panel on them, the styles that you can use are somewhat limited. Second, the lights need to be placed in an area with access to direct sunlight, so on cloudy days or in shadier areas they might not be as bright or burn for as long. Because of these limitations, solar garden lights usually work best when used as small pathway or deck lights. They generally come in the styles most people want to light their paths with and areas such as the driveway are relatively open to sunlight in most homes.

It is incredibly easy to make a garden light design that you can be proud of. It doesn’t take a professional or even someone who is artistically gifted. If you follow some basic tips and use your imagination, there’s no end to the different lighting styles that you can come up with for your garden.

Flood lights are one of the most popular ways of lighting up the outside of your home. This is because one flood light can bathe an entire area in light very easily. However, most people use these lights in an almost criminal way that washes out all of the mysterious shadows and colors you could enjoy with a weaker light. While many homeowners don’t use them in the right way, there are several very good uses for outdoor flood lights nevertheless. The trick is knowing how to use them properly.

How Not to Use Outdoor Flood lights

Flood lights should not be used to light up a huge area or your garden or deck. This totally negates the nighttime atmosphere that you could be enjoying and can even blind you or your guests if the light is angled toward them. Instead of bathing the entire area of your deck in harsh light, consider putting in some recessed lights that cast a more subtle glow over the entire area and light up steps and other hazards as well. If you need more light in certain areas, such as where you will have a barbeque grill for a table or chair where you enjoy reading instead put single lamps there to give you more light for that particular task. This will allow you to keep the nighttime atmosphere you want to enjoy while still giving you enough light to see and cook burgers or read.

Flood lights tend to wash out all of the colors that you could be experiencing as well. Remember when lighting your garden that less is more, so make sure to use your flood lights in a tasteful way that accents your property and plants, not a way that overpowers it.

Properly Using Flood lights To Light Landscapes

Despite some of their misgivings, flood lights are still a very versatile light to use on your property when used correctly. When attached to motion sensors they make excellent security lights that can be used to deter would be burglars. They also make excellent lights light up your yard for a late night game of lawn darts or catch. They can even be used your driveway if you plan on working on your car have other tasks you would like to accomplish. Make sure when you install them however, that the lights are placed at an angle where they won’t naturally get into anyone’s eyes and temporarily blind them. The key here is that the flood lights have an aim, a task they are supposed to accomplish. When used improperly for garden light they lose much of their appeal.

There are several ways to use outdoor floodlights appropriately for garden lights however. Instead of just baking your entire garden in the light of one or two of these, try uplighting one of the larger tees in your garden by attaching a flood light to a stake at the bottom of it and directing the light upwards. Just make sure that you use a waterproof rated bulb and fixture for this as rainwater will inevitably get into the fixture. Another great way to use floodlights in your garden is for back-lighting. Place a floodlight behind a tree or shrub to bring out a new ominous side of it when the sun goes down. Both of these methods of using floodlighting will make use of different shadows and give your garden a much more subtle look than if you just washed the whole thing in light.

Outdoor floodlights can play an essential part in any garden lighting scheme, but they must be used correctly. Instead of trying to light up every inch of your property, instead focus on trying to use the floodlights to play with shadows and achieve specific effects. If you follow these simple tips, you will end up with a much better lit, enjoyable garden.