If your home’s personality is the kind that makes you and your guests feel at home, you know that patio lights are part of it. You don’t just want them to keep you from slipping into a pratfall or a pool fall after the sun goes down-you’ll want your patio lights to tell every visitor you have, “This is me, too!”
Now, you put a lot of work into making your home reflect you. Why shouldn’t your patio lights reflect you, too? When they come in as many styles and with as many accents as you and your home have, picking will not be simple. However, it can be done.
Picking the patio lights you can make into what you want will be easier than you think. Because you are not limited to one kind. You can work with strings of lights, with party lights, with umbrella lights alike, and any one of them can be made to fit your deck. Which means fitting you.
Leave it just a round of glowing bulbs, suggesting the place you hang your coat, eat, and sleep? No, let us not go there. This is you. This is your home. You live here. In addition, you want everything to show it including your deck. You are not plain, and neither should your patio lights be.
Maybe you’re the hopeless romantic and you want a string or two of appropriate patio lights. You can opt for the flower look or the holiday globe look. (As in, the light globes that look as though you had extra Christmas tree ornaments to string up.) Maybe you’re the horticulturist to whom there’s no such thing as too few flowers. There are hundreds to try. You might be the rugged outdoors type–lanterns should work. You might be the genial host with two or even three patio tables for your parties-those umbrella lights are looking better every minute. Just like a classy pool club.
Here’s the bonus: they all look great when it’s party time and you’ve got a good group of people joining you for an evening of good drink, good food, good talk, good everything. Most important-if you’ve really given the appropriate thought to the atmosphere outside your home as well as inside your home, your patio lights will look like you. And that’s what your family, your party guests want to see when they come.
Follow these links for more information at patio lights galore about patio lights for outdoors.
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December 12 2009 | Gardening | No Comments »
The key to success with most projects is to clearly identify from the start what it is you aim to achieve – and installing solar garden lighting is no different. Do you want to increase security around your property, provide courtesy lighting for visitors, entertain family and friends, or quite simply make your garden more appealing at night?
You might of course choose any or all of the above plus a few other ideas of your own, which means you will also have to figure out how to balance various competing demands on your solar lighting layout. So you can see then that specifying your various objectives upfront makes it a whole lot easier to divide your outdoor spaces into discrete zones and identify suitable light fittings.
If for example one of your requirements is to deter intruders approaching your property then solar deck lights, while highly versatile, simply won’t cut it. But by the same token you wouldn’t want to entertain folk under the glare of a solar floodlight. Something softer is required, but not so subdued your guests can’t actually see what they drinking or who they’re talking to.
Outdoor solar lights that are intended to be primarily functional in nature (rather than simply appearing attractive) are easiest to install since the criteria they have to meet are typically well defined. When illuminating a pathway, for example, the simple test is whether the lighting does indeed enable you to safely navigate the path at night. Likewise, solar security lights should fully flood those areas you wish to secure against possible intruders.
Of course quite a lot of solar garden lighting serves no better purpose than looking pretty at night, which is a highly subjective and less than rigorous requirement. However, even this aspect is not without some basic ground rules worth observing. First is the obvious fact that solar lights need daily exposure to the sun in order to recharge their batteries, so you have to consider daytime as well as night time location.
Second, because solar powered lights have to last many hour on a single charge from a battery they cannot afford to burn as brightly as mains powered lights. Modern high efficiency LED bulbs that use vastly less power greatly help, but even these are still usually less bright. But this characteristic is not necessarily a weakness and it is possible to obtain effects with solar garden lights that mains powered versions cannot manage.
Thirdly, one of the main attractions of outdoor solar lighting is that it is both extremely easy to install and equally easy to rearrange subsequently. You aren’t stuck with your initial decisions regarding placement and can endlessly try out various arrangements until you settle on one that looks most pleasing to you.
Finally, never forget that it is your garden and therefore you can do as you please. If you want to string solar fairy lights along a dull fence or scatter sun jars at random then go right ahead. The fact is that pretty much any outside garden lighting looks a whole lot better than none at all, and it is near impossible to make a garden actually look worse by installing solar lighting.
If you found this interesting then be sure to check out this additional article that looks at solar powered garden lights in more detail.
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November 18 2009 | Gardening | No Comments »