LED Home Lighting

Outdoor LED Lighting In The Garden

Domestic LED lighting has been outdoors in the garden for a few years now and for good reason. Outdoor LED garden lighting is low voltage, safe, inexpensive to run, robust, reliable, easy to install and great to look at.

These days though, all the above remains true, but there are so many more options to consider as the technology constantly evolves and improves (and gets cheaper) and as ever more applications for outdoor LED garden lighting seem to spring up.

What most people want from their garden lighting system is something that delivers beautiful after dark effects outside yet is simplicity to install, safe for plants, animals and children, and won’t cost the earth to either purchase or maintain. As already noted, LED garden lighting ticks all the boxes.

Conventional garden lighting using incandescent bulbs or halogen spotlights can appear overly harsh, tends to be more limited in the range of effects available, is potentially harmful or even dangerous due to the high temperature of the bulbs and is more costly and time consuming to run since these systems use far more electricity (almost all of which is wasted as heat) and require frequent replacement of light bulbs.

None of these issues are present with LED garden lighting. Also, unless you want to up light a large tree for example, even a 20w halogen spot is way over powered for most garden lighting applications (and very, very hot - setting fire to dry grasses could be a real possibility).

Outdoor LED Garden Lighting Options

So, what choices do you have with LED garden lighting? Well, there’s outdoor LED spot lights of course, LED flood lights (which are basically more powerful spot lights), colored clear rock lights, LED patio and deck lights in a variety of sizes and colors, bollards, lanterns, spikes, and LED pond lights, for starters.

Let’s just take LED deck lighting for example. These can be fitted very easily into decking boards or indeed any outdoor wooden garden structure. It’s simply a matter of drilling a hole the same diameter as the deck light unit, dropping the connecting cable thru and pushing the LED light itself into the hole. And there it will sit, quite likely for several decades, performing reliably night after night with absolutely negligible cost.

Because they are so robust, durable and lightweight, you can fit LED deck lights not only into the regular deck boards that you walk over, but into the side panels of your decking and even into upright posts and the cross beams of pergolas where you can install LED deck lights at different angles to direct light back down. Put LED deck lights into fence panel posts or even highlight a garden shed if you feel so inclined. You are limited only by imagination (and taste). Many people assume they can’t use LED deck lights if they don’t have a deck - well, don’t let that stop you! LED deck lights are one of the most versatile components recently introduced into the outdoors and general garden lighting arena.

Interesting variants on regular LED deck lighting are solar deck rail lights and solar post cap lights which you can fit to pick out the line of deck rails and fencing. These are low power ambient LED lights that aren’t intended for illumination as such, more as a decorative finishing touch. They are easy to install and effortless to maintain.

Outdoor LED spot lights have been around for a while of course, not least because the highly directional nature of LED light is exactly what is required in a spot light but without the need to fit reflectors to focus the light beam. Used outside in the garden, LED spots are a perfect substitute for equivalent halogen bulbs but require a fraction of the power consumption and generate negligible heat (which can otherwise easily damage nearby plants or curious fingers and paws).

The key points to look out for when installing LED spotlights outdoors in a garden are beam angle (do you want a tightly focussed beam of light or one a little more spread out?) and LED light color. This isn’t just a matter of deciding on a color such as white, blue, red, green, yellow and so on, although that choice is also available. It is more to do with what is known as “color temperature” - whether the light appears “cool” or “warm” which depends on the sort of effect you are trying to create and is fundamentally a matter of personal taste.

How To Get The Best From LED Garden Lighting

When installed in bollards and spikes - frequently for the purpose of illuminating pathways - outdoor LED lights can be used to either replace normal garden lighting used for this type of application or to introduce interesting new effects. Conventional lighting simply can’t come close to matching the jewel-like quality of LEDs with their crystal sharp definition and rich colors.

Scatter a mixture of different colored LED spikes around your borders and also maybe use some diffusers to vary the intensity and your garden will be as colorful at night as during the day, if not more so. Which brings up another key point related to garden lighting, namely that artificial lighting really comes into its own when you let it be what it is - artificial.

Trying to recreate how your garden looks during the daytime is a) never going to come close to how your garden really does look in daylight and b) wasting an opportunity to take advantage of all the wonderful effects that artificial light brings to the outdoor night time garden party. Once you understand this you quickly realize another key factor in successful garden lighting - light intensity.

Human eyes adjust to night time conditions and simply banishing the darkness with a blaze of flood lights is most definitely not the route to a beautifully lit garden. Use lots of different types of LED light fixtures (spot lights, colored lights, accent lights etc) and vary the brightness to create effects that contrast, complement and generally work together with each other and your garden area. Blur the boundaries between house lighting and the garden by graduating the light levels rather than having an abrupt transition.

Above all, don’t make the common mistake of over illuminating your garden; keep the light levels relatively subdued when lighting outdoors(you’re not performing surgery out there) and leave large areas of darkness - you need a canvas to paint on and with garden lighting the darkness is that canvas. This works well with smaller gardens which can easily become overwhelmed by lighting, but it’s also effective in larger gardens. Rather than use brighter lights outside, just use more lights.

Because with LED garden lighting you can. As a general rule you can install 10 outdoor LED garden light fixtures for 1 halogen fixture - that’s an awful lot more light fixtures to play with! But if you do want to mix and match between LED and regular halogen bulbs in your garden lighting system you can easily do that too.

Typical Low Voltage Garden Lighting Installation

Many, if not most, home DIY garden lighting kits use a 12v (low voltage) transformer that has capacity to run a given number of watts. You simply run a cable around the areas where you might want to install lighting, connect one end to the transformer (indoors of course) and you may then attach outdoor garden lighting fittings to any point on the cable. So long as the total number of watts loaded onto the cable (i.e. the combined wattage rating of all your garden lights) is within the capacity of the transformer then you’re good to go. It doesn’t matter if some of the light fixtures are LED and some are halogen, just so long as the total wattage does not exceed the transformer’s maximum load.

A quick technical note here. In a 12v low voltage system, the cable itself applies a load to the transformer which you also have to account for. This is usually stated on the packaging and depends upon the length of the cable. It also means that lights furthest away from the transformer will tend to appear slightly dimmer than those nearer.

One way to both boost the current levels and spread them uniformly across the cable is to ensure the cable forms a loop, either all the way back to the transformer or to some point reasonably close. Obviously be sure to observe polarity if doing this (the cable is actually a pair of wires - do not cross connect the two wires).

Domestic outdoor LED lighting is ideal for garden water features - ponds, fountains, and running water - again because it is a safe low voltage; the LED light units themselves are very robust and run cool, and the pure, sharp quality of LED light complements water perfectly with dazzling reflections.

There are all manner of LED garden light fixtures that are suitable for enhancing outdoor water features at night, depending on whether you want to uplight, downlight, backlight or actually immerse LED lights in the water itself. There are for example, LED pond lights commonly available that can either float on the surface or be submerged and provide internal illumination from the bottom of the pond. But even the common or garden (couldn’t resist) LED spot light can be installed to produce brilliant effects in combination with water.

So, as well as lighting pathways, patios and ponds, and bringing key garden features and plants to life (some plants really lend themselves to artificial light and look far more dramatic by night than they do in the daylight), what else can you do with LED garden lighting? Well, there’s the obvious use of outdoor color changing LEDs in the garden. Used sparingly this can look really effective (though if over done it can make your garden look like Santa’s Grotto).

You can also play with outdoor LED wall wash effects - got a boring wall or fence or side of a shed? - bounce LED lights off it and turn it into a colorful backdrop. You can also use LED wash lighting to good effect outdoors on areas of well manicured lawn. Of course, should your lawn be other than well turned out then shame on you - apply some lawn maintenance and check back later; or for a truly left of field solution that looks good all the time, is maintenance free and ecologically sounder than you might at first think consider pairing artificial LED outdoor lighting with an artificial lawn - artificial grass saves water as well as many other hidden costs of maintaining a lawn.

Of course, some outdoor LED light fixtures, rather than be used to illuminate something else, almost beg to be the center of attention themselves. Outdoor LED light fixtures comprising small 1w single color LED bulbs work well as individual focal points - in a similar way that gardeners use bright colorful plants to draw the eye during the day time. Installed either with or without simple diffusers screens, the effect resembles a garden studded with rich blue sapphires, pure green emeralds, deep red rubies and a myriad other vibrant gemstones through every colour in the spectrum.

And finally, one other great benefit of LED garden lighting - the power consumption of outdoor LED lights is so low that you don’t necessarily even need to purchase a 12v transformer and lay a low voltage cable system. There are many choices available for solar lighting these days, not least with solar powered LED garden lights. The downside to solar powered LED light units is that they’re not generally so controllable (i.e. you can’t turn the whole system on and off with a conveniently situated switch).

There are, however, solar powered garden lighting systems whereby you can hook up a number of outdoor LED light fixtures to a single solar panel, which has two advantages: you can place the solar panel somewhere nice and sunny regardless of where the light fittings are situated, and you can turn a set of outdoor LED lights on and off from a single place. The great thing about mixing low voltage electricity and solar power is that provides a bit more flexibility to position outside LED lights exactly where you want in your garden without necessarily having to wire up the whole garden.

So there you have it: the perfect complement to LED home lighting - Outdoor LED lighting in the garden.