Patio Lights
Patio lights have come a long way since the days of simply blasting the area with a huge flood light.
Even in the coldest parts of the lower 48 states, there are several months of weather during which the urge to spend some time outside in the balmy evening, alone or with friends and family, is virtually irresistable. In southern climes these urges can be felt virtually year 'round. An increasingly popular way to enhance the experience, especially in the company of family and friends, is by the creative use of patio lighting. Of course, with the patio largely giving way in recent years to the primacy of the wooden deck, when one thinks of patio lighting, there is no functional difference from deck lighting. The terms are fundamentally interchangeable.
The basic idea of patio lighting is to provide not only a measure of safety against the risks of stumbling around in the blackness (ponder the financial risks of a tipsy guest looking for the guacamole) but also to provide aesthetic enhancement. When I was young, we had a beautiful stone patio nestled into the sloping yard on which my parents occasionally entertained. When darkness fell, it was my mission to go into the basement and turn on the floodlights mounted on the soffit overlooking the patio. No one could claim that they tripped and fell due to a lack of lighting, but the aesthetics of the experience were destroyed. No longer is there any need for such overkill.
The trend now is to provide lighting of a low intensity, arranged so as to provide enough light to see what needs to be seen or what is desired to be highlighted, without subjecting the entire area to glaring high intensity light. Just as candles can be used in preference to overhead fluorescent lighting to create a romantic mood, so can low intensity, low voltage lighting be used, if not to foment romance, at least to enhance a mellow feeling of peace and well-being.
The products available to accomplish this desirable goal of providing safety while enhancing beauty are legion. There are low voltage and solar powered lights available in a hardly imaginable array of designs and styles. Low voltage lights are connected to household current and are hard-wired to it through a transformer, which reduces the flow of electricity from something appropriate to run a washing machine to a level appropriate for fairly dim lighting. This type of lighting will require running actual wire of a small gauge from the power source to each and every lighting fixture. Obviously, wire isn't an attractive addition to any landscape, and, as a practical matter, there are likely to be places where running it across an open expanse can generate a tripping or strangulation hazard. If one is designing one's lighting system at the inception of the patio or deck design system, provision can be made to hide the wire. On the other hand, a retrofit patio or deck lighting system will have to accommodate the reality into which it's born.
Enter the solar powered patio lighting system. Recent advancements in solar power technology, while inadequate to power cities, allow for the use of small, low wattage solar powered lights. The concept is simple: power is generated by small solar panels attached to the individual lighting fixtures and stored until a light sensitive switch illuminates the fixtures at dusk. No more wires needed, except in the case of solar powered patio string lighting.
Patio string lighting does use wires to connect a number of small lights to its power source. However, the wire need only extend as far as the solar collector rather than to the source of household current. This makes it very much easier to hide the wires by the strategic placement of the collectors.
There are situations in which solar systems won't work well. I think of our patio when I was a boy. Our house backed into a wooded area, and the patio was in perpetual shade. It's questionable whether solar collectors could have generated and stored enough power in that setting to illuminate the lights long enough to outlast the little kids' bedtimes, which may be when the party really starts, after all.
Whether you opt for a number of discreet lamps, a series of string lights or a combination of the two, there are fixtures available to satisfy even the most creative of DIY lighting designers. Don't limit your search to the local home center, or just recycle your Christmas lights. Take a look online and you're sure to be amazed at the extraordinary variety of patio lights available.
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