Although outdoor landscape lighting adds a lot to any property in terms of both aesthetic value and functionality, it also produces some negative side effects. One of the most prevalent of these is glare, which is a type of light pollution. If you want to light up your landscape, but don’t want to brighten up the night sky or receive any complaints from your neighbors, here are a few tips that you can use to reduce glare from your landscape lights.
Glare is cause when light shines directly into your eyes. This reduces visibility. If its improperly installed, a garden spot light is one of the biggest offenders of this. The effect on your landscape, in addition to polluting the surrounding area with light, is disastrous. It washes out most of the detail and color and makes everything much harder to see. The main cause of glare is using too much light and not aiming light fixtures properly.
Fortunately, if your yard is filled with glare, the fix is relatively easy. First, only use just as much light as you need and try to hide the light
fixture as much as possible. One trick that many professional landscapers use is the use of cutoff lights.Cutoff lights are lights also known as shielded lights and contain a deflector that points the light directly where you want it. Not only does this prevent light from spilling over into other areas, it also allows you to use a lower powered light to accomplish the same task, further limiting the amount of light that you need to use in your lighting plans.
Finally, to reduce glare to the lowest possible level, place your lights lower to the ground. In fact, its better to have more lights lower to the ground than fewer lights higher. Lights that are higher up will spray more light onto areas around what you need lit, while lights that are lower to the ground will only light what you have them directly pointed at.
This article is a guest post from the Garden Lights Guru.
photo credit: Tela Chhe
