LED Landscape Lighting

The wonder of LED’s

A light emitting diode or LED as it is commonly called have been around since the early 20th century, but were not used for domestic or common household until the 1970’s. These wonders of lighting technology slowly paved way for much more efficient electrical consumption.

Further improvements with the composition of these LED’s have increased the efficiency output of bulbs to emit a higher luminous strength with out much increase in the amount of wattage required for it to function. This goes with an increase in the even longer life span as compared to conventional incandescent, fluorescent, and halogen lamps.

The application of LED’s as landscape lighting fixtures was realized in the later half of the 20th century as more and more people focused in furthering lawn improvements and finding new ways to enhancing landscape designs with lights that would not pose much risk and at the same time would cut the operational cost over time.

With the advent of landscape and similar projects utilizing LED technology, LED lamps or illuminators have been created. These are usually characterized by several smaller LED’s that are combined together in a single bulb fixture and focused to emit a synchronous light that would amplify the lumens emitted.

Other designs are simply single LED bulbs created in such a way that it is capable of a higher load.

What these are suited for

LED lamps are ideal for exterior landscape lighting designs since these can be modified and be set up with a low voltage setup. Combining the risk free setup of a low voltage arrangement and the higher efficiency for life span and luminescence, LED landscape lighting is a very practical method of accenting landscape areas.

However, the higher production cost would mean that the price for setting up a series of landscape lighting fixtures would cost more than using traditional lighting methods and materials. Nevertheless, the extreme long life of these bulbs are claimed to reach more than 40,000 hours.

This would compensate for the initial high cost of preparing these for landscape lighting. This also lessens the burden on the technician installing these lamps because the bulbs would not need to be replaced that often.

These LED lamps are also suited for the exterior landscape lighting method due to their relatively colder emission of heat as compared with incandescent, fluorescent, and halogen lamps.

Different tips and concepts

You may start projecting on what type of lighting theme you would be doing once you have decided to use LED lamps. Again, this is now where your artistic talents come into play as you try to envision what type of effect you want to accomplish over certain areas in your landscape.

One nice way of putting some pizzazz on your landscape is by using actual LED’s, the ones used in a signage. Of course these types of diodes need to be in some sort of casing so as not to have its pins be grounded. What would be done is to contour both sides of a path and make it look like a pathway similar to that of a cinema, wherein you would see the passageway be lit up faintly by either a blue, red, white, or yellow edge.

Another is by using LED’s as imitation fireflies floating on small bush branches. By using certain cords, tubings, and a simple control switch for LED’s, it may be placed discreetly in bushes so that when darkness falls, the subtle blinking of these LED lamps would look like they were real fireflies.

So whatever you may conceptualize with the cool and soothing emitting LED’s, you should balance the practicality of spending more initially and saving much in the long run, or rather have a cheaper setup and a shorter lifespan for your landscape lighting lamps.