Winter’s Electric is proud to offer the finest design and installation of outdoor lighting for your home and property.!It doesn’t matter how large or small your outdoor lighting project is, we’re happy to review and advise you on any outdoor lighting plans, whether you design it, your architect or landscape architect designs it, or we design it for you.

There’s nothing that highlights a home’s beautifully designed architecture or landscaping like a carefully planned outdoor lighting scheme! Here are some of our favorite tips for choosing your outdoor lighting system!

To begin with, it’s important to realize that lighting an indoor space is entirely different from lighting an outdoor space. Often, homeowner’s don’t realize how much choices will vary. First, indoor lighting reflects off of your home’s walls and furnishings, so it provides a brighter light with fewer lighting fixtures. In outdoor lighting, the light has less to reflect off of, because most surfaces are farther away, darker and/or irregular. Next, positioning and shielding are much more important outdoors in order to prevent glare. Lighting glare can be a problem if a light blinds you on a walkway – or bleeds into your neighbor’s bedroom window. Finally, indirect versus direct light have different effects indoors than outdoors. Indoors, direct potlights shining down from your ceiling provide nice clear lighting to work by in your kitchen. Outdoors, however, a light similar to a potlight shining down outside your entry door will brighten the door only, or only the small area it’s directed at. Outdoors an indirect light is generally placed at ground level or slightly above, and creates a soft wash on all surrounding surfaces. So, in beginning to think about your outdoor lighting scheme, these are some of the first things for you to consider:

1. How much lighting do you want, and how much lighting you need, and where should it be? (what is decorative; highlighting architecture or certain trees, and what is necessary: highlighting pathways and doorways.)
2. How bright should the lighting be, and should it have any kind of covering to either hide the source or keep the light from spilling into an area? (if highlighting a tree, a light source needs to be powerful enough to illuminate the lines of the tree in a pleasing way; if lighting your garage door, it either needs some kind of covering or a certain positioning to direct it at the door and not into your neighbor’s yard.)
3. Direct or indirect light – should you have one or the other – or both, and where? (direct lighting over a doorway helps find your keys, several lights planted at intervals in the ground next to an outdoor fence for example, will accentuate the whole fence in an interesting way.)