Stylish Garden Lighting

How many times have you heard this classic piece of gardening advice: design your garden as if it was another room (or set of rooms) in your house. It's sound advice because home and garden decor are, when you think about it, closely associated with each other.

But when was the last time you refurbished a room and like, just kinda forgot to put any lighting in. Oh yes, it's quite delightful with the contrast between the wallpaper and the dado rail while the curtains perfectly complement the suite, it's just a shame you can only use this room during office hours when you're out at work, on account of being unable to see your hand in front of your face let alone pick out the turquoise stripe on the matching cushions when it goes dark.

Yet how many times have you seen a beautiful garden fade into the empty blackness of the night 'cos no-one thought to add any lighting? It's not difficult to add stylish garden lighting using any of the contemporary solar garden lighting kits available these days.

Use garden lighting pretty much the same way you would indoor domestic lighting - draw attention towards those features you want to stand out and away from other areas, provide stylish functional lighting such as illuminated path markers and use low level ambient lighting to create "moods".

Your first consideration with garden lighting is choosing solar or low-voltage mains electricity. The principal pros and cons of the two approaches are as follows. Solar powered garden lights are easy and quick to install and rearrange later, whereas low voltage garden lighting requires that you lay and protect an electrical cable to all areas requiring lighting.

On the other hand, mains powered garden lighting can be easily controlled from a central point, is often brighter and doesn't suffer due to cloud cover and short winter days (the converse being the case for solar garden lights).

The best way to get started with mains powered outdoor lighting is to install a plug-in low voltage ring system. That's just jargon for a low-voltage (12 volts only, so very safe) cable laid out roughly where you might want to add lighting with one end connected to a 12v transformer (that bit goes indoors since the transformer input is standard mains voltage).

With a framework such as this, you can easily connect LED garden lights to any point on the cable, usually using specially designed weatherproof connectors supplied with either or both the transformer and lighting units.

The reasons for using LED garden lights are many:

• LED's are robust and suitable for outdoor use;
• they last one heck of a long time (think decades without bulb changes);
• LEDs are sharper and usually more colourful and attractive than conventional light bulbs;
• they don't get hot so no problems with scorching or contact with water;
• LED lights use typically less than 10% of the power of incandescent or halogen bulbs.

That last point isn't just about running costs (though that is also a consideration - why pay 10 times as much to illuminate your garden - and have to keep replacing bulbs?). The real point is that you get more bang for your buck, or more accurately, more light from your transformer.

The output load available from any domestic 12v transformer is limited (it varies, but 100w maximum load is quite common). Put 5 times 20w halogen spot lights on your system and that's it, you can add no more lighting - time to invest in a second transformer.

But with LED lights rated at between 1 to 3 watts for the equivalent light output you can immediately see how many more lights you can add to your system. And with so many different styles and colors available with LED garden lights that stylish night-time garden is now even easier to achieve.