Solar Yard Lighting Design Guide
Until I decide to buy solar yard lights for the first time a few years ago, I was pretty clueless on the whole exterior lighting scene in general. Basically, all I knew was halogen flood lights can brighten up your backyard and help with security. Now that I started this review site, I have a way to disseminate a lot of useful information on outdoor yard lighting. Today, I want to discuss how to design your backyard with lights using primarily solar yard lighting to provide navigation, style, decoration, and security. Let’s dive right in to your fun, new home project.
The key elements of design are atmosphere, brightness, illumination, and spacing. For this design guide, we’re going to be basing everything off my backyard. My backyard is larger than the average at about one acre of land. We have a water fountain located near the middle with a sidewalk winding its way to the fountain and also connecting the din (back of our home) to the garage backdoor. Located on the far right side of the yard is a modest garden. The entire landscape is fenced in with large shrubs lining the back fence both to promote greenery and vegetation as well as for security (against those who would jump the fence).
There are a few trees and bushes strategically placed outside. Some are shade trees in the middle of open space and others surround the patio. Again, style and practicality purposes are served but in this instance with trees and not lighting.
With this large backyard, I want to highlight the most important parts with light and the goal is to get the two-for-one dream scenarios where security and practicality meet landscape light decoration. I also want to keep costs down. High quality yard lights will add up quickly in price as we buy more and more sets so the strategic plan is to only illuminate as much as necessary.
The primary emphasis is around the home – especially if your house has a beautiful exterior that you want to showcase to potential patio dinner guests. We’ll furnish the yard area right on the edge of the patio with some sort of high profile, copper solar yard lighting to really give a sleek, but cozy feel to the patio. My patio spreads around the protruding din of my house architecture so we’ll probably want to spread 4 copper solar yard lights about 12-15 feet from each other. Most landscape lights max out at a 20 foot light radius so this will give us adequate lighting around the edges and high illumination near the focal point of the patio.
Wherever you or your guests will be, you want the light to be its brightest. At the edges, it’s better to be softer. If it’s dark outside, you don’t want to be struggling to see so you’ll definitely want to brighten up the table area but at the same time, you don’t need to have the patio area as well lit as your kitchen table.
Next, we’re going to implement solar pathway lighting around the sidewalk. Here is where I’ll go for cheaper pathway solar lights because we’re merely looking for a guide across the yard. Anybody we have in the backyard is not going to be sitting on the sidewalk admiring the led yard lights so we don’t have to spend a ton of money on these. We just want them to be able to stay lit for 6 or 8 hours and be able to resist the weather.
I’ve gotten one email and a neighbor asking me whether to go with plastic spikes or metal spikes. Obviously, you’re trading off higher quality for better price here. If they’re cheap enough, I’ll go with the lights with plastic spikes just because if they do end up working out, I just saved a ton of money. However, if I can get a good deal on outside lights with metal spikes, then I’ll go for something I’m more sure will last under the weather conditions night in and night out. The key here is to get a pack of 6 or 8 and line them along your sidewalk.
Should put your lighting on both sides of the sidewalk or just one side? This depends on what you have on either side of your sidewalk. For example, if you’ve got bushes edging your sidewalk, then just one side works. If you’re clear on both sides of the sidewalk, I recommend alternating the lights on both sides to save money. For example, I’ll go one on the left side of the pathway, walk 10 feet and then drive another solar light on the right side. Then, I’ll go another 10 feet and go back to the left side again. It’s really up to you, but I think the alternating lights works the best and saves you money.
Now let’s move on to the body of the landscape with tons of wide open space. Your best bet here is to pick out certain trees or objects you want to highlight. For example, I’ve got a few trees scattered in the open space so I’m going to put a rock solar light right next to the tree and face it up. The tree now stands out and it only took me one light to bring the vegetation out of the darkness.
Another way I’m going to get the most out of my solar powered yard lights is by placing one on both the left and right side of the fence and having them cast a glow across the entire backyard. You’re going to want to find high wattage, high power solar power yard lights for this purpose. I prefer ground lights here so you can focus and point all their brightness inwards rather than wasting light going towards the fence with a full circumference light. This gives you security because it takes away empty dead space and also helps liven up more areas of the landscape by giving you contrasting shadows and overlapping but unique shades of light.
Last, I want to go with security near the corners and back shrubbery area along the fence line. This is security not only against intruders but also from stumbling unknowingly across raccoons, snakes, possums, skunks, or whatever else. I might ditch the solar powered yard light here and go with something more powerful like a halogen flood light with cables installed beneath the ground (you don’t want to run over the wire with the lawn mower or have the dog chew them).
In this instance with the flood lights, we’re really putting the emphasis on avoiding any hiding areas that create pitfalls when we go out towards the back yard. It can get extremely dark with the rich shrugs and distance from the house, so I want to make sure there is enough yard lighting to avoid most surprises. What this also collaterally accomplishes is that we encase our backyard in a glow of light, even in the still of dark.
If you’ve paid close attention, you can see how I’ve kept a dense but soft glow around the home and patio area and gone brighter towards the body and back of the yard for more security purposes. In total, this scope of backyard lighting project complete with solar powered landscape lights and possible pole lighting around any deck area you might have is going to run you about $400 to $750 depending on the type of solar lighting you buy. As I’ve mentioned, you can save money by going for cheap solar yard lighting where eyes won’t be leering and then coming back to higher quality decorative light and style where eyes will be resting.
Read more about some different types of yard lighting you might want to buy.