Landscape Lighting Blog
Redoing Your Yard? Call Me Before the Landscaper Shows Up
I get a certain phone call every spring and fall and it goes about the same way every time. Somebody had their yard redone, the new landscaping looks great, and half the lights...
Lighting a Casita, Guest House or Detached Garage
A lot of houses in the Valley have something out back. Could be a casita that got built for the in-laws, or a guest house that turned into a home office a few years ago and never...
The Lighting That Comes From Up in the Tree
Most of what people picture when they think of landscape lighting comes up from the ground, a fixture sitting in the gravel pointed at a tree or a wall. That's uplighting and we...
Why I Only Put Brass and Copper Fixtures in Arizona Yards
Every so often somebody sends me a link to a landscape light on Amazon that costs about twelve dollars and asks if we can just use those. I get why. If you're lighting twenty...
What Actually Happens on Install Day
People ask me a lot of good questions before they sign off on a lighting project. What fixtures, what it costs, how long the LEDs last. But the question I get least often is the...
What People Actually Do With Their Lighting App After the First Week
When I'm demoing permanent trim for somebody, the app is usually where I lose them for a second. I'll pull out my phone and start swiping through colors on their own roofline,...
What You’re Really Spending on Christmas Lights Every Year
I had a conversation last fall that stuck with me. A guy in Chandler was asking about permanent trim, and partway through he said something like, well, that's a lot of money...
Why I Tell People to Book Their Holiday Lights in August
I start booking Christmas light installs in August. People give me a hard time about it. It was 112 yesterday and I had two holiday design visits scheduled. But there's a reason...
Do Permanent Trim Lights Raise Your Power Bill? Let’s Do the Math
I get asked this on probably half of my quotes and I've never written it down anywhere, so here it is. Short answer: no, not really. It's a few dollars a month for most houses....
Why the Lights at the End of Your Run Are Dimmer Than the Rest
This is one of those problems where people live with it for years and just assume that's how it is. You walk out front, the first couple of fixtures near the transformer look...
Outdoor Lighting Gets More Important as You Get Older
I do a lot of work out in Sun City and Sun City West, and a few years back I started noticing something about those jobs that I hadn’t really thought about before. The...
What Arizona’s Dark Sky Rules Actually Mean for Your Outdoor Lighting
Got a call from a guy in Fountain Hills back in the spring. He was pretty worked up. He’d put in landscape lighting himself, big weekend project, and somebody had said something...