For over 20 years Outdoor Lighting Perspectives has been providing our clients with the best lighting on the market. We’ve written a lot about how lighting technology has changed, from line-voltage and incandescent to halogen, solar and LED technology. Lighting has come a long way.
For homeowners who have had outdoor and landscape lighting for years, it may be time to upgrade your lighting to the newer LED options. Being more environmentally friendly is just one of the benefits of retrofitting (complete replacements are not usually necessary depending on the state of the fixtures) of LED. Here are just a few other benefits:
- High-efficiency – switching lights can save up to 80% in the energy cost to run outdoor lighting
- Longer bulb life – sick of replacing fading bulbs? LED bulbs’ light output is better and lasts longer, sometimes years without replacement.
- Warm, pleasing color – gone are the days of bluish white color. LEDs emit a warm glow similar to the halogen lights homeowners are used to.
- No toxic materials – As people are looking for safer products across the board, LEDs don’t have any mercury or toxic materials that increase your carbon footprint.
The process of retrofitting your lights depends on the state of your existing fixtures, but many systems can stay in place with a simple switch of the bulb technology. If the fixtures aren’t in good shape, we may suggest switching out some lights all together.
WHAT ABOUT SOLAR?
Yes, there is a greener option than LED: solar outdoor lighting. We’re often asked why we don’t use solar lighting in our installations. Quite simply: the technology isn’t quite there yet. Yes, there are fixtures on the market that will work well for a few weeks or months, but will it look like the day it was installed a year later? Probably not. Can they illuminate a second story building evenly? Probably not.
Our team of lighting professionals stay on top of the best fixtures on the market, and we hope that solar will be an option in the future, but until then we won’t recommend them to our clients. We simply want our clients to be happy with their system for months and years.
