Creating A Lush and Welcoming Landscape

Outdoor lighting is one of the great safety improvements of modern times, but installing it may prove to be a surprisingly tricky process. When performing an outdoor lighting installation, you have to think about everything from how the lights will be powered to avoiding trouble with other nearby systems. Before you get started on your project, take the time to plan for these eventualities.

Electrical Supply

Calculating how much power you're going to need to run all your lights is critical. You'll also want to ensure that you'll have some overhead in your setup to handle electrical surges and to provide room to expand down the road. Even if you're just preparing for a residential project, you might need to upgrade the electrical system at your location. This can include replacing or installing wiring, swapping in new fuse boxes and testing overall capacity. Be aware that only a licensed electrician can legally access the portion of the system that brings power in from the pole, so don't get too gung-ho to handle everything yourself.

One advantage that has come with the advent of LED lighting systems is that power consumption requirements have dropped significantly. Wattage is easy to calculate, as it's listed on the product box and can be tallied up.

Illumination Matters

A cultural relic of the age of the incandescent bulb, obsession with wattage as the measure of output from lights persists. These days, though, the figure that matters most for you is lumens, a direct measure of light output. Roughly speaking, 100 lumens will light a stretch of walkway, and an output of 100 to 300 lumens is appropriate for lighting large outdoor signs. If you're just trying to highlight a landscaping or hardscaping feature, dial things down to about 50 lumens.

Avoiding Trouble

The moment where a lot of folks decide to hand a project to an outdoor lighting installation services company is when it comes time to plan out the wiring for their systems. A major issue that many people overlook is that you can just throw power lines into the ground without knowing what's there. In the worst case scenario, you might end up digging straight into an unmarked electrical line.

Most governments require that the placement of all utility lines go into a county or municipal register. Have a surveyor conduct a search and mark out where the water, electrical, and gas lines are.