Lighting technology has been growing in leaps and bounds over the last 5 years. The light bulb as we know it today will end up being museum piece sooner rather than later. Changing something we have grown so accustomed has come with a lot of doubt. This is not without warrant, compact fluorescent light bulbs (curly-q’s) and early LED lighting technology left a lot to be desired. Slow warm-up times, mercury disposable issues and inconsistent life ratings have left the CFL (compact fluorescent) bulb with a rather negative impression. Most of us are not familiar with good LED lighting. The common perception of LED lights are bad color, low light levels and very expensive. Luckily, this is not the case anymore.

LED lighting is energy efficient; typically using 75-80% less energy than a comparable incandescent fixture.

The vast majority of LED light bulbs (ones that you can directly replace anywhere a typically light source is found) last for at least 25,000 hours. Our Kichler landscape lights with LED lighting technology built in have a rated life of 40,000 hours. That’s 13 years at 8 hours per night.

Light output is no longer an issue. We can see this with factual evidence. If you have been shopping for light bulbs recently you have probably come across a “lighting facts” label. The part most of us care about is the “lumen output”. Lumen output is the total amount of visible light emitted by a source; how bright something is. A standard 50 watt halogen MR16 produces 400 lumens. By comparison a GE LED MR16 produces 440 lumens with 7 watts. It is actually a little brighter than a standard bulb. Not to mention its going to last 12.5 times longer.

Lighting Facts

Designing beautiful landscape lighting is our main focus. Because of this, the color of the light is extremely important. A landscape does not look dramatic under orange street light (high-pressure sodium). LED lighting is perfectly suited for landscape lighting.

-It is on for extended periods of time, light bulb maintenance is costly and time consuming. LED’s eliminate this burden.

-Precise beam control is crucial to achieving the proper effect. Optical control in LED fixtures is incredibly precise. This is because of how they can be packaged within a fixture. Product engineers have been able to create wide beam spreads (60°) with no “spill light” outside of the beam angle. This holds true for even the most narrow beam spreads (10°). This allows us to pick the perfect fixture for what we are lighting.

-Traditional landscape lighting systems using halogen sources are costly to run. Even the most basic systems use at least 600 watts of electricity. We can run 5 times as many fixtures off of a transformer using LED lighting compared to halogen fixtures. This saves a huge amount of expense in your electrical bill and equipment cost.

LED lighting is the way of the future. The technology keeps improving and the cost has decreased considerably. This is a great change for the future. We here at Light Your Night pride ourselves on being the experts on cutting edge lighting technology. Comment with any questions you have!