Outdoor Lightning Installation For New Beginners

Outdoor lighting installation are primarily going to be flood lights, spotlights or path lights and you might want to consider a combination of all three depending on how elaborate you want your lighting scheme to be.

Outdoor Lightning Installation At Home 

Decorating the outside of your home for the holidays is always a creative challenge, particularly if you favor a unique lighting design. It’s doesn’t have to be complicated and sometimes a simple approach is best in accenting key features of your house and yard for maximum curb appeal. 

Nikos Phelps, president of Utopian Landscapes and Christmas Décor of Harrisburg, is a member of PLANET (The National Landscape Industry Association) and has some helpful decorating tips for homeowners who want to create memorable lighting designs. 

From his own experience as a holiday lighting specialist, Phelps recommends using LED lights because they are more energy efficient and require less wattage than incandescent bulbs. “Make sure the lights that you use are rated for indoor and outdoor use or specifically outdoor,” he cautions. “With most homes you can get away with one exterior outlet and most outlets are typically a 15 amp service. We try to keep our load at half of that (seven and a half or eight amps). Danger occurs when you start overloading the circuit. People think ‘Oh, they’re LEDS. I can plug a hundred thousand into this outlet’ so having respect for electricity is going to be your number one concern.”  

Architectural Highlights: The best approach to lighting the front exterior of your home is to start at the center and work your way out to the sides. You may have distinctive architectural details you want to showcase such as gables, arches, chimneys or other rooftop features. Achieving the perfect balance is important. “If we’re doing a house,” Phelps states, “we’re trying to tie the roof in with the ground so we have different layers of lighting. We’ll focus specifically on the fascia, which would be everything that is forward facing, because you get the depth, you get the height, you get the horizontal features.” Often a simple approach such as creating an outline along the gutter line or across the peak of the roof with the front door as the focal point is more effective than trying to cover your entire house or yard in lights. 

Landscape Features: If you are more interested in showcasing your yard, then shrubs and trees make good focal points, especially if they help guide the eye to the main entrance of the house. Phelps recommends a canopy wrap of lights for shrubs and a branch wrap for ornamental trees. Lighting walkways and the borders of garden beds also adds visual interest to the design. You may even have an outdoor sculpture or water feature such as a fountain that could become a showstopper if your lighting configuration is well executed.