VIDEO: Tree Lighting Tips to Showcase Your Landscape (Sponsored)
Outdoor lighting can make your home safer and show off the beauty of your property.
Photos
This article is sponsored by Home Depot:
Pretty soon, we’ll have more darkness than daylight as winter settles in. Tree and landscape lighting can lift the gloom and make your house safer at night.
“I think it gives you 24-hour curb appeal,” says Joe Archer, owner of Mobile Joe’s Landscaping in Alpharetta, GA.
Here are five tips to get you started:
- Walk around the property and figure out what you want to emphasize with outdoor lighting. Archer likes to show off the branch structure or the tree canopy. “It almost looks like the tree is floating,” he says.
- Try to get as much information as possible from landscapers or the Internet so you end up with results you can live with and love. Many landscapers will give you a free consultation.
- Use good quality fixtures. “There’s nothing more frustrating than getting it done and then three months later, the lights don’t work,” Archer says.
- Install security lighting to be landscaper-ready. Bury your wires so that your landscaper doesn’t cut them while doing yard work.
- Avoid in-ground fixtures if possible – they attract ants, and they are easily overwhelmed with mulch, which could become a safety hazard or ruin the fixture.
J. H.
11:35 am on Monday, September 24, 2012
I'm all for security lights with motion detectors but do we really need to be using energy to light our trees all night?
Dick Jones
6:46 pm on Monday, September 24, 2012
Lighting the front of your home with spotlight type lights blinds you and gives the approaching bad guys a perfect view of you and your loved ones. Think before installing any kind of lighting. Use the light to your advantage.
AtlantaTree Professionals
11:18 pm on Saturday, September 29, 2012
Good point about purchasing quality fixtures, sometimes I long for the days when most things you purchased would last longer than 2 years.
Thanks for the post.
Carl P Jordan
11:18 pm on Saturday, September 29, 2012
Both J.H. and Dick Jones are totally correct, and this blatant commercial for selling polluting/trespassing lighting fixtures discredits the legitimacy of PATCH as an objective news source. First, the statement that lighting "will make your house safer at night" is utterly false---numerous studies have failed to find any safety link. Second, the enormous carbon-release of electrical generation demands that frivolous applications be discouraged. Third, the glare, sky glow, and property-trespass implications related to upward-unshielded lighting justify the regulation of night-time lighting as a public good. Too bad Athens-Clarke and Oconee Counties remain in the pockets of Georgia Power and its supplier collaborators.