If you are wondering what qualities make up high quality landscape lighting fixtures you have come to the right place. Our goal here is to show you exactly what to look for when shopping for lighting fixtures. After reading this, you should be able to make an educated purchase, and get exactly what you need for your home’s lighting solution.
Body
The first thing you want to look at is the body. The best material that high quality landscape lighting fixtures possess is cast brass. A lot of times you will hear companies say their fixtures have a “cast brass finish” which is perfect. Not only does it look good aesthetically, but it also provides the most protection. It also has a bit of weight to it. When you hold it in your hands you will probably find yourself thinking, “man, this seems like some top quality stuff”. Cast brass will last many years longer than plastic or other lower grade material types you’ll find at general stores.
Bulb
This should go without saying but a light has no hope of being a high quality landscape lighting fixture if it does not have LED technology. LED’s (light emitting diodes) release more light and shine brighter while using less power. They are better for your home and for your electric bill. You also get the power of high voltage lights while still being able to be classified as a low-voltage light. Which brings us to our next point. Make sure your lights are low-voltage lights. Why? Because low-voltage lights are safer. Low-voltage lights provide significantly lower risk of electric shock and almost zero risk of electric arcing. Also the wiring is safer, but you don’t have to worry about that with us because we provide installation!
Weather Protection
The cast brass will protect lighting fixtures from 90% of weather problems. But one thing cast brass cannot protect your fixtures from is rain. So, you need to make sure the lights you have say something about sealing. For example, if you look at the video on our home page you’ll notice us pouring water all over our lights. A proper sealing job will do two things. For one, it will protect water from getting into the lighting fixture, obviously. For two, it will prevent puddling meaning it will not allow a puddle of water for form on top of your light. This is a difficult design task to achieve, but high quality landscape lighting fixtures need this feature.
Functionality
There are a few things you are looking for as far as functionality is concerned. The first thing you’ll want to look for is a glare guard. It’s even better if it’s adjustable, like ours are :). Glare guards are just great for making sure your lights can be powerful but not annoying. The second thing you want to check is if the lights are dimmable. With some lights it doesn’t matter as much like with path lights or step lights. But with something like downlights it’s extremely useful, because you never have to climb up to your downlight to adjust it. The last thing you will want to check out is the light’s spread. Even if you get the best of all the high quality landscape lighting fixtures, if the light doesn’t spread to cover what you need then it’s useless.
Maintenance
This one is about making your life easier, and we all want that right? We recommend doing some checking to see how easy it is to change out the lights in case life happens and that is needed. For example, our video on the front page shows that you can change out the lights in our lighting fixtures in under 30 seconds! Nobody wants to change lights even when it’s easy. It’s kind of like changing the toilet paper roll. It takes less than 10 seconds to do, but husbands and wives across the world are getting mad every day at their spouses for being lazy and not doing it. So please, for yourself, make sure this is an easy process.