From day to night – lighting done right

Posted on April 20, 2011 by 33social

One of the things we offer is a free nighttime demonstration so that you actually get to see what a particular lighting design will look like for your home and property – prior to an installation.  That eliminates all of the guesswork and surprises – and you will know exactly how much you will have to invest to achieve that desired lighting effect.

Most of our typical lighting installations in Colorado range in price between $3,500 and $6,500. Not surprisingly, most homeowners have no idea how many lights they may need or want – or what their investment range might be until we do the evening lighting demonstration.  And that’s perfectly OK because we do not want you to purchase a lighting system sight unseen.

Additionally, we do our nighttime demonstration for these other reasons:

  • It is your house, not our’s – and you know best how you would like to have your house and property illuminated in the evening.
  • Exact placement of the fixtures can be determined in order to safely light steps and other hazards, and to effectively light architectural features.
  • We can show you several different lighting options that you may not have considered previously.
  • The evening lighting demonstration is an event that your entire family can participate in and provide input to the lighting design.

Here is what you will see.

 

Outdoor lighting Colorado before and after
Outdoor lighting Colorado before and after

Filed under: Free outdoor lighting demonstration, Garden Lighting, Home-Community Security/Safety, Residential Lighting, Security/Safety | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Garden Lighting Looks Great 365 Days a Year

Posted on January 22, 2011 by outdoorlightingofcolorado

Garden path light with melting snow

With only 56 days until the first day of spring, I thought that it was worth mentioning that garden lighting looks great regardless of the season of the year. Most homeowners are afraid that garden lighting will make their yards look ugly during the non-growing seasons – but nothing can be further from the truth. Having grown up in Pennsylvania, I always loved seeing the deciduous trees and shrubs in winter because of the ever-changing beauty of both the branch structures and bark textures. The interplay of light and shadows that can be created by garden lighting is truly magnificent after a new snowfall, in the spring with flowering trees and shrubs, in the summer with trees and shrubs under full-leaf , and of course in the fall with multi-color leaves. Once the landscaping and the lighting have been installed, mother nature provides the ever-changing and exciting palette of colors and hues for a homeowner’s enjoyment.

Colorado Outdoor Lighting Path Light

Path Light after a Snow Storm

Garden lighting can be used to illuminate a pathway to reach a gazebo, a fire pit, or patio – or be used to illuminate a prized flower bed with colorful annual and/or perennial flowers. Sometimes a focal point of garden lighting will be a water feature, koi pond, or a piece of sculpture. And in Colorado, garden lighting helps to provide safety and security after dark for both young children and pets especially with the prevalence of coyotes, mountain lions, and bears.

Path Light – Summertime

With any good lighting design, the important thing is to not flood the area with light but to carefully highlight only the parts of the garden that are interesting aesthetically or are needed for safety – pathways, steps, etc. The lighting designer is basically an artist who is “painting” with light – and he or she with the homeowner’s input can choose to include anything on the blank lighting “canvas” in order to complete a compelling masterpiece that will be enjoyed for many years to come.

Colorado Outdoor Path Lighting
Garden lighting for gazebo, rock wall and trees.

In Colorado, homeowners love their rocks – character moss rocks, rock walls, massive red rock outcroppings, and huge granite boulders in the mountains. Hey – they don’t call this the Rocky Mountains for no good reason! Outdoor Lighting Perspectives (OLP) of Colorado has illuminated rocks and boulders of all sizes – and it helps to add three-dimensionality and interest to any garden lighting design.

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Runway Lighting is for Airplanes

Posted on May 22, 2010 by outdoorlightingofcolorado

Solar Runway Lights for Cars?

One of the worst lighting design mistakes is the creation of runway lighting by lining each side of a driveway or walkway with lights. Some neighborhoods give the appearance that the homeowners are leaving the lights on for the return of Amelia Earhart!

The other evening I was walking Cody the Airedale and snapped these photos with my camera phone. It’s bad enough doing runway lighting with low voltage or line voltage lighting fixtures. It’s even worse when some of the current inexpensive and low-powered solar lights are used. In the photo above, the fixtures are literally two feet apart. We totally love the use of solar photovoltaic/LED lighting when it’s done properly – but these inefficient standalone solar lights are ripping off the unsuspecting homeowner.

Solar Lights Used on a Patio

One the right is a photo of a patio being under-illuminated by standalone solar lights. There’s a fairly large dropoff from the patio down to the lawn – so you can see that these lights will not provide the proper illumination for preventing falls especially if there’s a party.

The photo below illustrates the proper way to illuminate a walkway. As you can see, the path lights alternate from side to side along the walkway. The other thing you’ll notice with this design is that other lighting effects are used as well. Uplighting is used to illuminate the columns of the pergola as well as the trees. This keeps the lighting effect appearing fresh and interesting and not monotonous – the way it would look if you just did path lighting.

Proper Use of Path Lights along Walkway

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2010 HBA Home and Garden Show

Posted on March 4, 2010 by outdoorlightingofcolorado

Come visit us at the 2010 HBA Home & Garden Show – March 5th through the 7th at the Phil Long Expo Center – 1515 Auto Mall Loop in Colorado Springs. We’re located in Booth #602.

The show hours on Friday are from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m., on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

We’ll have residential and commercial fixtures on display, as well as our new and innovative low voltage LED landscaping lights that won a Hot Products award from 9News at the Colorado Garden and Home Show.

We look forward to seeing you at the show!

Filed under: Ceramic Metal Halide, Commercial Lighting, Community Events, Green Energy, Home-Community Security/Safety, LEDs, Residential Lighting | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Mead’s Article – Outdoor Lighting Makes a Statement for a Community – Published

Posted on January 27, 2010 by outdoorlightingofcolorado

Hi – it’s Cathy here. I just wanted to let you know that Mead’s article – Outdoor Lighting Makes a Statement for a Community was published in the December 2009 issue of Common Interests – a publication by the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Community Associations Institute. Mead’s article in its entirety follows.

 

 

 

Outdoor Lighting Makes a Statement for a Community

Mead L. Noss, P.E.

Owner, Outdoor Lighting Perspectives of Colorado

 

Communities take great pride in the aesthetics of their public spaces and landscaped areas during the daytime, and in the evening a community’s outdoor lighting should also set the appropriate tone. Does the community seem warm and inviting (safe and secure)? Or does the lighting detract from the overall experience of the neighborhood? Are the residents enjoying the public spaces after dark with well-illuminated path and bikeways?

More often than not, outdoor lighting in communities can be improved greatly with modern bulb technology, fixtures, and more effective lighting design. How many times have you driven by a community entrance with beautifully landscaped flower beds in the daytime only to be aghast at the same location in the evening as the once-beautiful landscaping is now bathed in the harsh yellow light from high-pressure sodium floods? In the current economic times with increasing energy costs and reduced operating budgets, communities now have the option of enhancing their outdoor lighting without sacrificing safety, security, aesthetics, usability, or energy efficiency.

Safety and Security

With any outdoor lighting system, safety and security are paramount. A good community lighting plan begins at all of the entrances to the community. You certainly want homeowners and their guests to find the community easily after dark but more importantly you want emergency fire, police and medical crews to find their way there even more quickly.

Well-placed and directed lighting will enhance the view of security cameras at an entrance gate or community center. Additionally, the security and accessibility of community mailboxes will be enhanced with overhead lighting.

Clubhouses, parks and other public areas must be properly illuminated to prevent falls and injuries after dark, as well as to deter vandalism and other crimes. Street lighting especially at intersections throughout the community enables motorists to find street signs after dark and to allow pedestrians to safely enjoy their evening walks.

The security of individual homeowners’ houses is also improved by architectural and landscape lighting that illuminates both the home and the perimeter of the property. Any police department in the state or country will tell you that burglars will almost always target the homes without lighting rather than taking risks with homes that are well-illuminated.

One of the myths about security and outdoor lighting is that if a little lighting is good, adding much more lighting is better – right? Well, that’s not actually the case. If the lighting fixtures produce lots of glare, adding additional fixtures of the same type or increasing the wattage of the bulbs will actually produce more glare thereby reducing visibility and security. A truism of good lighting design is that the quality of light is always better than the quantity of light.

Aesthetics and Usability

The aesthetics and usability of the overall lighting found in a community is of the utmost importance. The impression of the community after dark should be warm and inviting without harsh lights or glare. How often have you driven into a community only to be blinded by unshielded carriage lights at the entrance or by unshielded carriage lights along the street on driveway columns?

There are two types of glare – nuisance glare and disabling glare – and carriage lights along the street really do approach the level of disabling glare, especially for older drivers. As we age, our eyes become more susceptible to the effects of glare and it takes us longer to recover our full vision.  

Misdirected flood lights from one neighbor’s house into the adjacent neighbor’s yard (called light trespass) is unpleasant and can be categorized as nuisance glare – and it certainly affects the usability and enjoyment of the affected neighbor’s yard or his/her night’s sleep if the lighting is visible from their bedroom.

Any time that a bulb source is visible to anyone living in or driving through a community, it means that the lighting and resulting energy costs are wasted because the lighting is not directed to only where it’s needed.

Energy Efficiency and Cost

One of the first rules of lighting design is to not specify more light than you need; i.e., do not use line voltage metal halide lighting fixtures where low-voltage quartz halogen or LED (light-emitting diode) fixtures might do. It all depends on the ambient lighting conditions, what needs to be illuminated, and how the space is to be used in the evening. Evening lighting demonstrations with different lighting and cost options can provide communities with meaningful and visual comparisons from which to base their future capital improvement decisions.

Recent technology has improved to the extent that lighting designers and contractors can now provide energy efficient lighting that is effective from both a lumen output and Color Rendering Index (CRI) standpoint. What exactly is CRI? CRI is the comparison of how well a particular light source emits a color approximating a noon time sun (See the following table).

COLOR RENDERING INDEX TABLE

LIGHT SOURCE CRI
Noon Day Sun 100
Great Color (color matching above 97)   95+
Good Color   80 – 94
Poor Color (where colors do not show)   79
Fluorescent and Induction Fluorescent   50 – 98
LED   70 – 80 (getting better)
High Pressure Sodium   50
Quartz Halogen   80 – 92
Metal Halide   80+
Ceramic Metal Halide   90 – 96

 

Ceramic Metal Halide bulbs (39W or 70W) with a 15,000-hour life powered by low-voltage or line-voltage systems provide the true color (90-96 CRI) that is desired for lighting entrances, parks, and clubhouses in the evening.

Quality low-voltage LED (light emitting diode) fixtures with 50,000-hour rated life bulbs have recently become available and with an acceptable and improving CRI. The tradeoff investment-wise is a higher initial cost with lower residual operating costs.

When comparing bulb sources and efficiency, another helpful term is the lumen. A lumen is the measurement of reflectant light off of a surface. This is how all light sources are rated as you can see in the following table:

LUMEN COMPARISON BY LIGHT SOURCE

LIGHT SOURCE LUMENS/WATT
Incandescent   8
Quartz Halogen  15 – 19
Mercury  30 – 40
LED  30 – 80
Fluorescent  40 – 80
Metal Halide  80 – 110
Induction Fluorescent  80
Ceramic Metal Halide  80 – 110
High Pressure Sodium 120

 

As you can see from the table, incandescent bulbs are very inefficient and high pressure sodium bulbs are very efficient, as long as you like everything looking yellow in the evening. With respect to energy efficiency and light quality, line voltage or low voltage ceramic metal halide and low voltage quartz halogen lighting systems are the best solution, with low-voltage LED lighting systems becoming more and more acceptable for certain applications. In fact, LED lighting installations powered by off-the-grid solar photovoltaic systems are the optimum solution for community areas requiring lighting but having no readily available source of power.

Maintenance

Warranties and maintenance costs become very important over the long term with respect to lighting systems – and communities and their respective homeowners should try to obtain the best warranties available. In addition, the best maintenance for any lighting system is usually provided by the original company that installed it since they are most familiar with the product and installation. However, not all companies that install lighting systems also provide maintenance so that is an important consideration when evaluating a contractor.

As with any other asset in the community, lighting systems need to be maintained on a regular basis to provide optimum performance and to serve the needs of the community. In closing, the appearance of any outdoor lighting system (daytime or evening) really does set an appropriate tone for the community.

Sources:

  1. Go Green, Save Green presentation, Outdoor Lighting Perspectives Commercial Lighting Division, 2008.
  2. Illuminating Engineering Society

Filed under: Bulb Technology, Ceramic Metal Halide, Commercial Lighting, Design, Green Energy, Home-Community Security/Safety, LEDs, Maintenance and Service | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

CELEBRATE EARTH HOUR TODAY

Posted on March 28, 2009 by outdoorlightingofcolorado

voteearth_enEarth Hour is being sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund to bring attention to the growing problem of global warming and its adverse effects on the planet. Even though we’re a lighting company, we urge you to show your support and make a statement by turning off your non-essential indoor and outdoor lights between the hours of 8:30 PM to 9:30 PM. This will help decrease your carbon footprint slightly but more importantly it will show your symbolic support for this global iniative.

In downtown Denver, the State Capitol, the Denver City and County building, and several skyscrapers will go dark during this time. Over 4,000 cities worldwide are participating this year. By comparison, only 400 cities were involved last year. From the pyramids in Egypt to the Eiffel Tower in Paris to the Harbor Bridge in Sydney, all of these well-known structures will have their outdoor lighting dim or be turned off completely during this period.

As an outoor lighting contractor, we are already committed to energy efficiency and conservation. The good news is that outdoor lighting and landscape lighting we install for residential applications is either low-voltage quartz halogen (12-volts) or low-voltage LED (light-emitting diode). On commercial applications where line voltage (120-volts) is required because of loads and distances, we still employ very energy-efficient 39W to 70W ceramic metal halide bulbs.  So what makes our lighting systems green? Please read the following:

Low Voltage Lighting. Every outdoor lighting system we install is low voltage rather than line voltage. Our outdoor lighting system transformers are designed to reduce the standard 120-volt line voltage used throughout homes to low voltage 12-volt electricity, which powers our outdoor lighting systems. In otherwords, 12 volts of power run from the low voltage transformer through the wire to the low-wattage bulbs mounted in the lighting fixtures. Our lighting systems provide energy efficiency while illuminating your home and property with soft, ambient accent lighting. In addition, our professionally designed low voltage lighting systems are precisely bright enough to illuminate a home’s exterior and landscaping, at a cost about 50- to 60-percent less to operate than with a standard 120-volt outdoor lighting system. To further enhance energy conservation, our low voltage lighting fixtures are strategically placed to highlight the key features of the architecture or landscaping, so that the light is not “wasted” by just flooding an entire area. And sometimes if not done properly, the light can spill into a neighbor’s yard and this is called light trespass.

Low voltage LEDs can save even more energy than low voltage quartz halogen systems but the initial investment cost is much higher. We’ll have information about our LED lighting systems in a future blog.

Heavier-Gauge Wire. The heavier the gauge of wire used in electrical systems, the less energy is lost as current travels through it. We use 12-, 10-, and 8-gauge wire in our lighting systems, with the 12-gauge wire being used primarily in residential installations. Also, voltage loss increases as more fixtures (or higher loads) are connected to a single wire run. To prevent this, we construct our systems with multiple wire runs and multitap transformers with output voltages ranging between 12-volts and 22-volts.

Choice of Lamps (Bulbs). Rather than incandescent bulbs, we use low-voltage quartz halogen bulbs (4,000 hour life), low-voltage LED (50,000 hour life), or line voltage CMH (ceramic metal halide – 15,000 hour life bulbs for commercial applications). All of our bulbs also incorporate reflectors which help to brighten and focus the resulting light without having to use higher wattage bulbs.

Control Technology. Our company, Outdoor Lighting Perspectives of Colorado, recommends the use of control technology to automatically turn on and off necessary indoor and outdoor lighting on the interior and exterior of the house. The control system we use is Lighting Control Automation(TM) (LCA). With this system, the latitude and longitude of the house is programmed into the controller (and on a daily basis any time of year) the lights will come on at exactly astronomical sunset – not two hours before or an hour late. This system eliminates the energy wasted by the old-technology timer/photocell systems; invariably the photocell becomes shaded and the lights turn on too soon or the mechanical timer ends up being three hours out of synch because of power failures.

In addition, the LCA system can be used to automatically dim exterior architectural carriage lights, porch lights, soffit lights, and/or garage lights by 20- to 40- percent for additional energy savings. Interior lights can be integrated into this system as well for more energy savings. In addition to automatic control, any of these “intelligent” lights on the interior or exterior can be manually controlled from inside the house for even more energy savings.

So tonight, celebrate Earth Hour and if you already own a low voltage outdoor lighting system or a whole-house lighting control system, give yourself a pat on the back for helping to reduce your carbon footprint on the planet!

Best regards,

Mead Noss

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Welcome to our lighting blog!

Posted on March 17, 2009 by outdoorlightingofcolorado

Welcome to our webblog – Outdoor Lighting of Colorado’s Blog! As the owners of Outdoor Lighting Perspectives of Colorado for the last ten years, we have designed, installed, and maintained lighting systems throughout Colorado at elevations between a mile high and two miles high! Ten years ago outdoor lighting for homes in Colorado primarily consisted of architectural carriage lights, lamp posts, and DIY kits from hardware stores and big box stores, and the occasional line voltage landscape lighting system. We’re proud of the fact that we have played a role in bringing professionally designed/installed and environmentally-sensitive outdoor lighting systems during these last ten years to the most beautiful state in the country – Colorado!

Our blog is intended to share our experiences and insight about lighting design, product development, installation techniques, maintenance issues, control considerations, and general business lighting practices. We hope our blog will assist homeowners and business ownrs to better understand what goes into a professional lighting system – and do-it-yourselfers (DIY) may find it of benefit as well.

So we hope you find our blog enjoyable and informative as we go forward.

Best regards,

Mead and Cathy Noss

Owners, Outdoor Lighting Perspectives of Colorado

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