Now that the Christmas season is upon us, nothing brings out the magic of the holidays around your home like a dazzling display of holiday lights. It’s the time of the year that homeowners try to create an enchanted winter wonderland that’s inviting and decked out for the season. Whether you want an elaborate display of lights, like icicles drizzling off the rooftop, or a simple accent of lights on the front of your house and door, the right lighting is essential for a festive look.
While traditional incandescent holiday lights are still a favorite among consumers, there have been tremendous advances in LED technology over the past few years. Today’s LED lights offer many advantages over the traditional incandescent lights, including:
- Energy savings of up to 80%
- A lifespan up to 20 times longer
- More durable and cool to the touch
- More strands can be connected together on one outlet or extension cord
Some of the most popular locations for holiday lighting include:
- rooflines or eaves
- bushes, hedges and trees
- pillars, posts or deck railings
- windows and door frames
- driveways and pathways
- window boxes and planters
With all of this talk about holiday lights creating a magical sparkle for the Christmas season, it’s important to remember that this dazzling illumination only last about six weeks. Once it’s over the spark is gone, but if you have premium year-round landscape lighting, it lasts for every season and brings a bit of pizazz to your property daily.
Premium Landscape Lighting
Most homeowners work hard to make their homes and yards look top-notch and beautiful, but all of that effort is lost when night falls and the beauty fades away into the shadows. However, with a good transformer, timer and some landscape lights placed in strategic places, you can take your yard out of the darkness and put all of its beauty on display.
When landscape lighting is thoughtfully planned out and done right, landscape lighting brings out the best of your home’s environment by highlighting its architectural features while drawing attention to plantings, gardens, bushes, shrubs and trees. Best of all, landscape lighting enhances your property 24/7, 365 days a year for a breathtaking illumination of your home’s finest qualities.
Most of today’s landscape lighting is low voltage and can be expanded to as many lights as the power of the transformer that you buy. Some come in kits already to go and range in the number of lights or spots so you can make an interesting mixture of lighting. Although low-voltage lights receive only one-tenth the power of the old 120-volt systems because of a step-down transformer, there’s no limit to the dramatic look that they can achieve. You can enjoy the feel of moonlight beaming down from a tree’s canopy to a subtle glow that cascades over a garden because this creation is more than just picking the right hardware. It’s an attractive lighting scheme that is all about design and artistry.
Premium year-round landscape lighting does more than simply illuminate the exterior of a structure, plantings or property. One of its great attributes is to actually extend living space physically as well as visually since landscape lighting pushes the boundaries of a house. By going beyond the boundaries, your home takes on a visually striking look from the outside of the house, especially when the interior lights are turned off. You can extend the practice of boundary lighting even further with a fence or shrub line that represents your property line. With a small output wall wash illumination fixture, one light can be overlapped to create a continuous wall of light that will subtly show the edges of a yard.
So, which is better? Holiday lighting is a sparkly seasonal event that creates a magical place for all to see during the holiday season, but premium landscape lighting creates a visually appealing environment that people can enjoy year-round.