How does Landscape Lighting Add Security to your Home?

16 Oct How does Landscape Lighting Add Security to your Home?

In addition to adding beauty and function to your outdoor spaces, landscape lighting can help improve the safety of your home and its surroundings. In fact, sufficient outdoor lighting is one of the best ways to keep your home safe. A well-lit home can deter would-be burglars and make your outdoor spaces safer for you and your guests to navigate. Let’s take a closer look at how landscape lighting can add security to your home. 

Light Up Your Address 

Make your home easy to find for paramedics, first responders, police, or firefighters by illuminating your house numbers. While lighting up your address is unlikely to deter criminals, proper lighting can help emergency personnel get to you more quickly and efficiently. This could prove to be crucial in an emergency situation. 

Illuminate Doorways and Pathways 

Proper lighting eliminates shadows around doorways that make it easy for potential intruders to hide. Plus, if doors are well-lit and easy for neighbors and passersby to see, prowlers will be deterred from trying to break in. 

Lighting up your pathways makes for safer navigation around your property for yourself and guests. It also provides a more subtle way to light up large areas by creating multiple pools of light. Light fixtures with 360-degree illumination, or omnidirectional lights, are an ideal choice for lighting up pathways and entry points. 

Brighten Dark Corners and Shadowy Areas 

Strategically lighting dark corners eliminates hiding spots for prowlers. If you find you have a lot of shadows in your yard despite having good lighting, it may just be a matter of adjusting your lights. Shrubs, trees, walls, and fences can all cast shadows when they’re not lit properly. It’s possible you need to add more lighting, but adjusting the landscape lighting you already have may be all you need to fix the issue. 

Light Large Areas With Floodlights 

Floodlights are powerful, wide-angled lights, and the most commonly used form of security lights. They offer a simple way of illuminating a large area with a single fixture, and are a popular choice for side yards, garages, or any area that is away from the main house (barns, sheds, etc). But while floodlights offer an easy way to light a large area, it can be easy to overdo it. While you want to have sufficient light to deter would-be criminals, your landscape lighting should also enhance the beauty of your property. That’s where working with a pro lighting designer comes in—they’ll help you create a lighting layout that gives you the best of both worlds. 

Add Soft Lighting With Downlights 

While floodlights are one type of downlight, there are more subtle ways to use downlighting on your property. Narrower downlights offer softer illumination, allowing you to highlight the beauty of your yard while also warding off intruders. Downlighting provides an elegant moonlight effect around your home and a more natural-looking form of security lighting. 

Uplight Large Trees 

Climbable trees near your home can provide an easy way for an intruder to access upper-level windows, balconies, or rooftops. But that doesn’t mean you need to cut those trees down or worry about constantly trimming the branches. Installing uplighting to illuminate the branches is a simple way to make those entry points less desirable to prowlers. 

Implement Motion Detector Lights 

Motion detector lights are one of the most effective ways to deter intruders from your home. As their name suggests, motion detector lights turn on when they detect movement within a certain range. They are a perfect way to light areas that you may not want lit all night long, such as your parking area, garage, doorways, side entrances, gates into your backyard, etc. Motion detector lights allow you to illuminate those areas as needed while potentially saving you some money on your energy bill. 

Work With a Professional 

You need a plan to ensure your home and its surroundings are properly lit—that every security risk is addressed along with your personal preferences for the look of your home and outdoor spaces. A professional lighting designer can help you determine the best type of lighting for your particular needs and design a landscape lighting layout that adds security to your home while also providing beautiful illumination. 

If you’re considering adding landscape lighting to your property, or need help with redesigning your lighting layout, the pros at Skip’s Sprinklers & Outdoor Lighting can help.

Serving the Twin Cities metro area and western Wisconsin for over 40 years, we have the skills and experience you need to safely and beautifully light your outdoor spaces. We’ll work with you to design your lighting layout and draft a comprehensive plan to ensure the success of your outdoor lighting project. Give us a call today at 651-437-6082 to get started. We’re looking forward to working with you!