Landscape lighting is meant to be installed outdoors where they can illuminate the open area and add beauty and elegance to the surroundings.
Lighting can hide obvious landscape problems while highlighting the positive features by just illuminating the right thing. Spotlighting brings out textures more effectively while using different angles can be more dramatic. Underwater lighting works best in fountains and ponds.
Use of colored lighting to highlight a tree or using the brighter lights around tennis courts, pools, and other activity areas increases the visibility and is safer too.
Silhouette lighting, provides the special effect by illuminating large outdoor surface areas like walls using a wash light fixture. This causes objects in front of the lighting to appear as silhouettes.
Advantages
Low-voltage landscape lights increase security by lighting paths, pools, drives, entry areas. These are mounted on built-in stakes, are flexible, movable and easy to install. The entire system uses 12-volt current.
Another advantage of low-voltage wiring is lightweight and can be laid on the ground or buried below the surface. Once installed, 120-volt systems are relatively permanent, while outdoor landscape low-voltage lighting fixtures can easily be relocated if one has to change the lighting scheme. Low-voltage lighting equipment is quite inexpensive also.
Types
There are many installation techniques, placement, and combinations, which can increase home security, safety, and enjoyment.
You might like to consider the solar powered landscape lighting, which completely eliminates wires and transformers. And because there is no wire, these lights can exactly be placed at the desired location. They have a photoelectric panel that charges a battery during daytime and when the sun goes down, a light sensor or photocell activates the lamp.
They are low in cost and flexible plus its illumination is very low and very soft adding elegance to the entire set-up. They also prevent accidents as chances of getting entangled into the wires are completely eliminated so, they are really great compared to the old landscape lighting that had wires and transformers.
Another alternative to explore is fiber optics lighting. In fiber optics lighting individual strands of ultra-pure glass conduct light from remote sources.
Underground plastic coated fiber optic cables are very flexible in laying as they can be molded into concrete walkways or walls. Since no electricity or heat is transmitted through these cables, it provides maximum protection against fire and accidents.
Disadvantages
Low-voltage lighting has less lighting power. However, such problems can easily be dealt with by using bright 12-volt halogen lamps, which can be very effective when used to flood an area with light.
The low-voltage lighting transformer that powers the system must be sized to match the combined wattage of the lamps used. Another disadvantage with low voltage wiring is that the wires are not buried deeply and are more prone to being damaged.
One can try moonlighting, which is a design technique that illuminates general outdoor areas for increase in safety, security, and aesthetics of the house. If done properly one would like to spend more time outdoors.