Your outdoor space is as important as your indoor area. Proper lighting can elevate the look and feel of your landscape and help your business grow and prosper in new ways. But choosing between the various lighting styles and fixtures can be a real challenge for any business owner.
This article breaks down the key features of landscape lighting and helps you get the right landscape lighting for your outdoor business.
3 Factors that Define Landscape Lighting
Your lighting style is a personal choice driven by a combination of practical value and aesthetic style.
A lighting style for an outdoor restaurant would not work for a golf course. Choose a landscape lighting style that best suits your business. Consider safety, nighttime visibility, atmosphere, and aesthetics to narrow down a lighting design.
- Safety
Outdoor lighting should always treat safety as a core design element. Common safety issues include running into trees, slipping on gravel, or stepping into a puddle.
If your customers and staff members see an obstacle, they can avoid it. Additionally, business owners should ensure that all relevant warning and caution signs are properly lit and readable.
- Visibility
Safety lighting will resolve most of your outdoor business’ visibility issues. However, lighting visibility focuses on a lot more than safety.
Visibility, especially at night, gives customers a complete view of your outdoor space. Businesses like amusement parks and skiing resorts should have lighting fixtures covering the entire area.
This way, customers can see all the entertainment value your business offers.
- Aesthetics
Finally, we have to talk about aesthetics. Lighting design showcases your business’s personality, style, and atmosphere.
You want a warm and welcoming outdoor lighting setup for a restaurant. Other occasions will call for brightly lit landscapes for a more focused feel.
Pair the Right Type of Lighting Technique with Your Business
Once you have narrowed down your choice of lighting design, you can move on to the type of lighting fixtures and their best application.
Fixture design and lighting placement determine your lighting technique. Certain lighting techniques will help highlight your building’s architectural details, while others will elevate your landscape features.
Let’s look at some of the most common outdoor lighting techniques and their impact on your outdoor businesses.
Floodlighting
Floodlighting uses wide beam angle light fixtures to illuminate an outdoor space fully. The goal is to improve outdoor visibility and dissuade intruders from stepping onto your property.
Floodlights are the best landscape lighting solution for sports venues like stadiums, golf courses, etc. They provide athletes with a clear view of the field, allowing them to play at their peak performance.
Wall Washing
Wall washing is an indirect lighting technique that provides softer ambient lighting. Here light fixtures are placed directly in front of your walls. These lights will illuminate and highlight the design and architecture of your walls.
Additionally, the light bouncing off of the walls will result in indirect illumination of your landscape.
The wall wash technique will provide less illumination than floodlights, but the resulting light will be more pleasant due to a lack of harsh light glares.
Accent Lights
Accent lights are less focused on visibility and more on dramatic effect. Small light fixtures with a narrow beam width
comprise the bulk of accent lighting.
Accent lighting is an excellent solution to highlight certain aspects of your landscape. Specifically placed to drive the focus of passersby to one point. You can place accent lights around fountains, statues, works of art, or outdoor signage.
Path Lighting
Path lights are smaller light fixtures with low brightness placed at the sides of a pathway. These compact light fixtures provide a soft, gentle glow around your feet and guide you through the outdoor terrain.
Path lighting is an efficient way of guiding guests from one place on your property to another. Additionally, if your path has stairs/steps, you must use step lights with path lights.
Security Lights
Security lights typically consist of motion-controlled flood and spotlight to deter potential intruders. Businesses with larger spaces, like ski resorts, amusements, parks, golf areas, and factories, don’t have enough manpower to patrol the outdoor area.
Hence these businesses deploy security lights to prevent anyone from using the cover of darkness to sneak in and out of the location.
Foliage Lighting
Foliage lighting combines other lighting techniques but predominantly focuses on using foliage (trees, plants, and bushes) as anchor points for light fixtures.
Such landscape lighting involves using short spotlights to illuminate garden walls, spike lights to highlight bushes, string lights on trees for overhead lighting, etc.
Foliage (or landscaping) lighting has always been popular for business owners with large landscapes full of trees.
Outdoor Lighting Requirements
Before starting your outdoor lighting, decide on your business’ lighting requirements.
Lumens
Lumen is the total amount of illumination provided by a light fixture. And the lumens per square foot of space are defined by food-candle.
A 1600-lumen bulb illuminating a 100 sq. ft. area will have a surface luminance of 16 foot-candle. As per OSHA regulations, your outdoor lighting must have a foot-candle value of 10 or more.
IP Rating
IP (Ingress Protection) rating is a certification of an electronic device’s water and dust proofing capabilities, including light bulbs. Landscape lighting is often subject to dust, debris, rain showers, and the occasional flooding.
Light fixtures with a high IP rating are recommended for the best landscape lighting possible. Remember that you want a minimum rating of IP44 for outdoor lighting, with IP65 recommended for harsher operating conditions.
Energy Efficiency
A 60W incandescent bulb can output 800-900 lumens of light, while a LED bulb can output the same amount of light at 10-12W. Hence, you can get the same amount of illumination for a 6th of the total power consumption.
Quality and Durability
Landscape lighting is inherently more damage-prone than any interior lighting solution. Rain, dust, and humidity can significantly decrease the lifespan of your light bulbs.
Lighting placement can mitigate some of this damage. But for proper protection, you need to invest in higher-quality and more robust light fixtures.
Design, Style, and Aesthetics
Finally, you have your design and style considerations. A business needs to maintain a certain level of polish in its aesthetics, especially for a business that relies on customer engagement.
Your landscape lighting must reflect the look and feel of your business. Choose fixtures based on what best suits your landscape.
3 Business Decisions That Will Help You Light Your Landscapes
- Use LEDs for Landscape Lighting for Your Business
LEDs and landscape lights are a match made in heaven. Outdoor areas require continuous illumination from light fixtures. Something that can be quite costly for businesses with a large exterior space.
The efficiency brought on by LEDs can significantly lower operating costs. Most businesses can save up to 80% on electricity bills by switching to LEDs from their incandescent or halogen bulbs.
- Take Advantage of Advance Lighting Controls and Automation
No landscape lighting solution is complete without a proper lighting control setup. Modern technology has allowed businesses to control the operating duration of their outdoor lights with exceptional precision.
You can use automatic lighting control systems like DALI Lighting Control System to remotely control the brightness of all your lights from a central location.
- Importance of Seeking Professional Help
DIY (do it yourself) lighting solutions are a good option for small businesses with a few dozen light fixtures. But as your business grows and expands, the need for professional help becomes obvious.
Lighting engineers and contracts can guide you and help you achieve your ideal landscape lighting design safely and efficiently.
Always consult with a professional when working on large lighting projects.
How Much Should You Spend on Landscape Lighting?
You can spend as much or as little on your landscape lighting. However, certain cost metrics can help you define a good budget baseline.
- As of 2023, the general cost per fixture is around $100- $200, regardless of your fixture design.
- Your choice of light fixture is the next biggest contributor to cost. Small wall and path lights cost as little as $50 a piece, with lamp posts up to $1000.
- Labor costs are charged by the hour. Hence complex projects that take a lot of time will be much more costly.
- Next, we have cost per area. It will cost you significantly more to light a larger landscape, even if the number of fixtures stays the same.
- Lastly, you should consider the cost of particular lighting fixtures. Underwater and in-ground lights will cost more than typical wall or tree lights.
It should be noted that the prices mentioned above are a US nationwide estimate. The actual prices will vary from state to state.
Conclusion
Landscape lighting is an important element of any outdoor business. It helps define the look, feel, and atmosphere of your business. Choosing the best lighting setup comes down to the specifics of your landscape. Focus on tall trees with string lights, use warm color temperature for sitting areas, utilize wider beam angles for lighting efficiency, and emphasize safe passage with path lights.
Discover the Perfect Lighting Solution for Your Business with RC Lighting
RC Lighting is a LED specialist that has been developing high-quality lighting solutions for businesses across the globe. Reduce costs and take your business to new heights with a reliable set of long-lasting lighting fixtures.
All our products, from floodlights to spotlights to bollards, undergo thorough inspection and testing and comply with various international safety standards. Additionally, all RC lighting products come with a standard 5-year warranty.
