What type of outdoor lighting is best if you just tripped over your kid’s skateboard while carrying a tray of bacon-wrapped shrimp and you’re about to tumble headfirst into the swimming pool?
Any lighting, right?
Wrong. No lighting. Do you really want everybody to witness this humiliation?
But under normal circumstances, you want a variety of types of landscape lighting out there. Just one can’t handle the task of illuminating your varied outdoor life.
What are your must-needed landscape lighting techniques? Uplighting. Wall washing. Path lighting. Bistro lighting.
Let’s learn more about outdoor lighting design in Florida, including:
- Uplighting
- Wall washing
- Path lighting/Downlighting
- Bistro Lighting
- Landscape Lighting Techniques: When Things Go Wrong
- The Priciest Outdoor Lighting Design in Florida Isn’t Necessarily the Best
- Outdoor Lighting Techniques: Should You DIY?
1. Uplighting
Uplighting is a staple of outdoor lighting techniques. You see it all the time. You just might not know it’s called uplighting.
When you drive past your neighbor’s house at night and realize their triple-trunk foxtail palm looks like a million bucks, that’s uplighting. (Note to self: you need a triple-trunk foxtail palm.)
That gorgeous fountain in front of the HOA you wish you could afford to move into? Uplighting.
Uplights are pretty self-explanatory: they cast light up at a tree, a building or a landscaping feature from below.
If you have cool trees with textured bark or intriguing branches, you want uplights. Why leave those beauties in the dark?
Uplighting as part of your Sarasota landscape lighting instantly elevates just about anything.
It’s custom designed, too. Uplights are available in a variety of wattages to perfectly highlight the height and size of whatever you need to illuminate.
2. Wall Washing
Unlike uplighting, wall washing isn’t just like it sounds. No sponges or soap are involved.
But it does provide a classy “wash” of light, casting a soft, even illumination over a wide surface.
Maybe you have a garden wall adorned with a pretty flowering vine. A wall wash is perfect to highlight it at night.
While an uplight can easily direct light as high as 30 feet tall, wall wash lighting spreads light in about a 8 by 8 foot area.
That makes this outdoor lighting technique great for shorter palms like a Pygmy date palm, with its dense, full crown of arching glossy, green leaves. A hibiscus tree or bougainvillea tree are great candidates, too. Their spectacular flowers deserve to be appreciated after dark.
When you realize how amazing wall washing looks, you’ll start wandering around your yard looking for other things to wall wash.
If only your dog would stand still…
3. Path Lighting/Downlighting
Path lighting sounds like a one-purpose light, but we love its surprising versatility.
Sure, path lights light your path, aiming the light down and to the side of the fixture so you don’t trip and fall. But let your landscape designer get a bit creative, and these handy little lights take on a whole new life in your Sarasota landscape lighting.
Path lights are also perfect for illuminating other cool stuff lurking down below, too. Maybe you have intriguing ground cover, like variegated Asiatic Jasmine ‘Minima’ with pretty green and yellow leaves.
Groundcovers add great color and texture to your landscaping — but not if they’re in the dark.
Path lights can highlight great low-growing annuals, too. Why limit them to just preventing you from falling down?
4. Bistro Lighting
Here’s where outdoor lighting has some fun.
These strings of festive lights create an instant party and they’re more versatile than you think. They’ll become among your favorite outdoor lighting techniques.
Sure, you’ve seen them strung over patios. They look great there and make the most mundane evening suddenly fancy.
But these string lights are happy to hang out in all sorts of places, adding automatic pizzazz to your Sarasota outdoor lighting:
- Add them to your pergola to make this sturdy structure a magical retreat once the sun goes down. If your pergola is set back a bit from your house, even better. The lights will beckon from afar in a captivating invitation. Line the pathway with lights, too, so the stroll out there becomes special.
- Add string lights to your patio umbrella to make this hard-working shade provider a fun evening element, too.
- Add bistro lighting to your outdoor kitchen. It’s already cool hanging out in an outdoor kitchen, where drinks and snacks are at your fingertips and entertaining is almost effortless. Add the sparkle of string lights overhead and the vibe is pretty much perfect.
- A 10 p.m. dip in the pool gets extra sparkle with poolside bistro lighting. Bonus: the gentle glow makes everybody look good, so you feel great in your swimsuit.
Pro tip: There’s no reason to connect these string lights to the rest of your outdoor lighting.
You don’t need them on all the time. They’re special, remember? In fact, if they’re on all the time they’ll compete with your other landscape lighting, and you don’t want that.
Have an electrician install an outdoor outlet with a switch inside the house so you can turn them on only when you want to use them.
Landscape Lighting Techniques: When Things Go Wrong
Great landscape lighting automatically attracts attention. But what you don’t see is pretty important, too.
Here’s what we mean:
A homeowner called us recently after a smaller company installed her landscape lighting and she said her lighting was flickering. Could we come fix it?
When our lighting techs took a look, they discovered that instead of grease-filled wire nuts like installers are supposed to use for outdoor lighting they used electrical tape — which had already started to disintegrate. Not cool.
Here’s the problem: outdoor lighting wires are buried underground or sometimes exposed, making them vulnerable to moisture and shorts.
Electrical tape is clearly not tough enough to protect outdoor wiring from the elements — especially here in Sarasota during the rainy season.
Even standard wire nuts fail outdoors, allowing corrosion that causes landscape lights to flicker or fail. Skilled landscape lighting installers use grease-filled wire nuts in Florida outdoor lighting design. They’re waterproof, self-sealing connectors filled with conductive grease that protects the outdoor wire splices from moisture, dirt and corrosion, preventing connection failures in wet conditions.
Landscape lighting wiring is vulnerable in other ways, too.
Those wires that cross from your lawn into planting beds are always getting sliced by landscape maintenance equipment like those sharp 4-inch edger blades.
Over time, plant roots push the lighting wiring up closer to the surface, which makes it easy to get cut. Suddenly, an entire section of your outdoor lighting doesn’t work.
Tropical Gardens lighting pros encase the wires in protective conduit sleeves so they don’t get cut.
That points out a big advantage to hiring a landscaping company expert in both landscape lighting techniques and landscape maintenance.
If you’re a lighting contractor with no experience in lawn maintenance, you might not think about this cut wire situation. Here at Tropical Gardens, we do both. If you know, you know.
Partner with landscape lighting pros who take extra steps to make sure you have high quality landscape lighting installation designed to last.
The Priciest Outdoor Lighting Design in Florida Isn’t Necessarily the Best
It’s easy to assume the most expensive brand of outdoor lighting is the best. Not true.
Here at Tropical Gardens, we love
the Brilliance brand and FX Luminaire, both medium-priced brands that offer great quality. Plus, Brilliance offers a lifetime warranty on some of its fixtures.
Outdoor Lighting Techniques: Should You DIY?
Maybe you’re pondering tackling this task yourself. There must be YouTube videos with instructions, right?
We understand the allure of DIY. In fact, you can hire us to create a lighting plan and you can do the installation.
But do you know what you’re doing out there? Would you think to light not just the trunk of your majestic oak tree, but also several spots high up in the canopy, for a truly stunning effect? That’s a pro designer move.
Do you know to leave a few extra feet of wire tucked away in your outdoor lighting installation to allow for nature’s pesky habits?
Sometimes a root grows and pushes the landscape lighting wire up out of the ground. We leave extra feet of slack to allow for that.
Will you know enough to install a transformer powerful enough not just to handle your current lighting load, but have enough oomph to provide extra power in case you want to add to your outdoor lighting design later?
Here at Tropical Gardens Landscape, we install transformers that can handle double the voltage you need now, so adding more landscape lighting is no big deal.
Do you know about wattage and color temperature and how far away from the transformer low-voltage landscape lighting fixtures can be?
Installing your own landscape lighting is definitely a challenge. If you’re just trying to save money, you should know that your Sarasota landscape lighting can be phased in over time if the cost puts you over budget.
Ready for Expert Landscape Lighting in Sarasota? Talk to Us
You definitely don’t want to take an unintended tumble into the pool holding a tray of bacon-wrapped shrimp. That’s a very sad waste of shrimp. And bacon.
But outdoor lighting does so much more than keep you safe. It makes your outdoor living luxurious, festive and magical. It extends your precious outdoor time as late into the night as you can stay awake.
Partner with landscape lighting services in Sarasota who really know their stuff. Let’s get started
Give us a call or fill out our form today! Our team of Sarasota designers will help you create the perfect wow-worthy tropical outdoor lighting. Sunset can’t come fast enough.
