The Benefits of Residential Outdoor Lighting

The Benefits of Residential Outdoor Lighting

Residential outdoor lighting serves a multitude of purposes – from framing your property to improving security and helping to prevent accidents. Let’s take a closer look at the benefits that come with installing the right lights for your home. Most landscape designers aim for subtle, glare-free illumination. One of the best methods they use is known as moonlighting.

Safety

Residential outdoor lighting serves many purposes, from highlighting key features of a home to enhancing safety. It can be particularly helpful in preventing accident-prone trips and falls on stairs, walkways and porches. It also deters trespassers and criminals by making it harder for them to hide and navigate around a property.

Residential Outdoor Lighting

Often, the best security lights are driveway flood lights that have motion-sensor activation. These can be installed to shock intruders with a bright, focused light that also records their activity. This can deter them from coming back to the property and provide valuable evidence.

Curb Appeal

Many homeowners choose to add landscape lighting as a way of beautifying their home. This type of residential outdoor lighting allows homeowners to showcase garden features or architectural details at night, which unifies the home and landscaping. Well-lit areas also make homes feel safer and more inviting, which is especially important around entryways.

Lights such as spotlight sconces can be used to highlight a beautiful stairway, garden, prized rose bush or other focal point. They are available in a wide range of styles and silhouettes and can be controlled with dusk-to-dawn operation, dimming options or smart home configuration capability.

Another benefit of outdoor lighting is that it can boost curb appeal by showing off a property’s best features at night. This can increase a home’s value, as potential buyers see it as a high-quality feature of the house and yard. It can also serve as a deterrent to unwanted visitors, as criminals are less likely to lurk in well-lit areas.

Energy Efficiency

Alternatively, solar-powered lighting harnesses natural light to illuminate your yard. While these lights do require a bit of maintenance to keep them functioning properly, they are self-sustaining and emit no fumes or greenhouse gasses.

Landscape lights disperse a warm glow around a pathway, deck or yard to create a welcoming ambiance. These lights are ideal for illuminating architectural features of your home or specific plants and shrubbery in your yard. They can also be paired with a motion sensor to deter prowlers and save energy by turning on automatically when it detects movement.

Residential Outdoor Lighting

Value

Outdoor lighting is a practical and relatively affordable upgrade to your home that enhances its value. It highlights the beautiful exterior architecture of your house and wraps it in a warm, welcoming ambiance at night, making it look stunning in marketing photos and allowing prospective buyers to envision themselves living there.

In addition, well-placed lighting makes it safe to traverse your property after dark. It also helps to deter criminals who tend to use shadowy areas around homes as hiding places while planning break-ins. It’s a smart addition to your security system and complements other safety features such as motion detection cameras.

A professionally created and installed lighting plan is a feature that will increase your property value. Working with a landscaper familiar with the various fixtures and techniques such as highlighting, silhouetting, uplighting, washing and moonlighting is important to achieve the desired effect. The right lighting design can make your home stand out in the neighborhood and help you recoup the initial investment when it comes time to sell.