Landscape Lighting for Driveways
How to Choose the Best Landscape Lighting for Driveways
If you are wondering what the best landscape lighting for driveways is and how to have it installed, you may be overwhelmed with the options available to you. Driveway lights aren’t just an aesthetic benefit. They are important for safety. Therefore, it is essential to make careful decisions when choosing landscape lighting for driveways.
Many of us realize that we need landscape lighting for driveways once we see that our driveways are poorly lit. A badly lit driveway can be a danger to our family, guests, and landscaping.
Why Would You Want Driveway Lighting?
Landscape lighting for driveways has more benefits than you may think. Driveway lights can easily be dual purpose lights, increasing the safety of your property and highlighting what makes your home beautiful and unique at the same time. Here are some of the benefits of landscape lighting for driveways.
Avoid Accidents
If you have a very long driveway, making sure that it is well lit can be very important to ensure that your family, guests, take out drivers, and anyone else who comes to your home after dark can see clearly.
It is amazing how rapidly light from the road or the house vanishes on even a moderately long driveway. If it's too dark to see easily in your driveway, driveway lights are an important consideration in order to avoid accidents.
Make Your Home Easy to Find
A well-lit driveway with distinctive signature accents can make it much easier for people to find your house. If you have ever struggled to explain to someone where to turn or what to look for, lighting that accentuates an architectural feature of your gate or the numbers of your house may be just what you need in order to make it easy for people to find your home.
Curb Appeal
You work hard to show off your landscaping during the day, so why shouldn't you also make landscaping beautiful by night? Since people's first impression of your home is generally the perspective from the driveway, you can really make an impression as people drive past your home or go up your driveway.
Show-off what's most beautiful about your house, like the signature oak tree in the front yard or the beautiful bricks on the front of your home. If you spend hours on bordering flower beds during the daytime, make sure that they also look gorgeous at night with driveway lights.
Safety and Security
Plenty of light can deter thieves and make it more likely that a potential burglar will target someone else's home instead of yours. Lighting is especially important in entryways like your driveway.
Protect Your Gardening
It can be very easy for people to accidentally back up off your driveway or take a turn incorrectly and end up running over your flower beds or other landscaping. A well-lit driveway will make it easier for people to stay on the pavement and off of your garden.
How to Choose the Best Landscape Lighting for Driveways
Choosing the right landscape lighting to accentuate your landscaping can be challenging. Should lights be mounted on the trees that border your long driveway? Will spot lights mounted on posts on the side of the driveway do a good job of showing off your irregular paving stones? Perhaps you want lighting that will also show off the beautiful color in your flower beds as you drive down the driveway every night.
- Recessed. Recessed lighting fits into specially made coves in the ground or wall in order to shed light while protecting the light fixture. Recessed lighting is a good choice for anywhere that it may be very easy to hit the light with a vehicle.
- On posts. Landscape lighting on posts shed light evenly and create a charming effect of small circles of light being cast upon the ground. These kinds of lights are a good choice when there is room to show off the landscaping around the driveway as well as illuminate the driveway. Posts may be short enough to only shed light on the ground or they may be tall enough to light the area around the driveway as well.
- Mounted on trees. Landscape lighting mounted on trees is an awesome choice for driveway landscape lighting because so many driveways have signature trees along them. Lights that shine up into the tree can illuminate the driveway while also showing off the branches. Lighting that shines down from the trees can replicate the look of moonlight.
- Dual-purpose. Sometimes, landscape lighting can be utilized to light a courtyard area, porch, garden, etc as well as illuminating the driveway. If you have a fountain or other significant feature along your driveway, dual-purpose lighting may be a great choice.
Here are some considerations to help you choose what will be the best lighting for your needs and driveway.
Use Recessed Lighting When You Want Lighting Right on the Driveway
Using recessed landscape lighting buried into the asphalt or mounted in a low retaining wall along your driveway can thoroughly illuminate the driveway with minimal energy usage and provide a very interesting effect across your pavement.
This is a great choice for relatively small spaces where you want the light to be contained but also provide some artistic effect. It may be best to contract your landscape lighting company along with someone to install your driveway so that the two elements will be combined perfectly.
Use Pillars for Emphasis and Visibility
Pillars are great to draw the eye up and attract attention. A pillar with your house number is the perfect solution for making it clear which house is yours. Pillars with lights shining down on your driveway are also a great way to achieve a charming effect that can accent cottage gardens or other quaint homes.
Use Your Landscape
If you have majestic trees reaching over your driveway, lights mounted into their branches can be the ideal way to light up your driveway with an effect like natural moonlight and also draw the eye up into the beauty of the trees. You can also use landscape lighting to accent various aspects of your landscape all the way along the driveway.
Use Motion-Sensitive Lights to be Cost-Conscious
Sometimes you want a parking area to be flooded with lights, but other times it may be nice to only see some gentle lights accenting your flower beds. By using motion-sensitive lights, you can provide plenty of light when it is needed and save money when it is not.
Create Continuity
Consider integrating your landscape lighting for driveways into your overall landscape lighting. Even if you only choose a couple of landscape lights to highlight attractive shrubs or signature trees in your yard, by drawing the eye from the driveway and into the rest of your yard, you will create a more cohesive effect.
Solar or Low Voltage Landscape Lighting?
It can be attractive to imagine the simplicity of popping a few solar lights in along your driveway to provide light for your driveway, but the truth is that landscape lighting for driveways looks best when the spacing and brightness is consistent.
It can be very challenging to achieve consistent exposure to the sun for solar lights while maintaining equal spacing. For this reason, it may be best to go with low voltage landscape lights unless your entire driveway receives full days of sunshine.
Install Landscape Lighting for Driveways Yourself or Hire a Professional?
Landscape lighting for driveways is some of the most important landscape lighting that you will have on your property, and it can also be some of the most difficult to keep safe. It is all too easy for your landscape lighting to be hit by a car, especially if you are lighting the driveway that is the main access point for delivery drivers and guests as well as family members.
If a landscape light goes out, someone may mistakenly think that they are supposed to drive there or not realize that the driveway ends, resulting in damage to your landscaping or your guest’s property.
It may be best to have your landscape professionals such as pavers work together with a landscape lighting company in order to achieve a cohesive result. Landscape lighting for your driveway that is professional and effective and will last for the long-term is much more difficult to achieve on your own.
Call American National Sprinkler & Lighting for Your Landscape Lighting for Driveways
American National Sprinkler & Lighting has been installing beautiful lighting accentuating gardens and landscapes since 1984. Their aim is to install lighting that is well planned out and quality enough to last a lifetime without needing to be replaced.
They can even save you money by choosing the most efficient placement of driveway landscape lights and using the lowest effective voltage so that your lights will cost less to run over time. Whatever your goals in lighting your driveway and whatever effects you would like to create, American National can install beautiful lighting that meets your needs.