5 Security Lighting Techniques to Keep Your Home Safe at Night
Security lighting can improve most any home’s security system.
However, there are varying opinions and multiple ways security lighting can be approached.
In this post, we discuss our 5 favorite techniques/concepts to help improve your home’s security with low voltage landscape lighting.
1. Motion sensors aren’t always the answer
For a long time now, its been argued that lights with motion sensors are the best kind of lights for security.
The idea is that the bright lights will switch on once an intruder enters the property and scare them away.
So what’s the problem with motion sensors?
Good security lighting is meant to do two things: act as a deterrent to trespasser, and allow you to see if anyone has entered your property.
Motion sensors often fail to effectively deter trespassers because the trespasser still has to enter your property before the lights will turn on.
If motion sensors fail to deter, then what is our other option?
The better deterrent is the kind that will keep someone from entering your property in the first place.
We like to say that a well lit property is a property less trespassed. In other words, the lights should be kept on during the evening without motion sensor activation.
Motion sensors fail to effectively deter trespassers because the lights miss their opportunity to deter trespassers from even considering your residence as a possibility.
2. Create rings of security
Effective security lighting should deter trespassers.
However, it also needs to reveal if anyone ever does enter your property.
One of the advantages of illuminating your property with landscape lighting is the way it creates bespoke rings of security.
Extending the reach of your lighting to the very outer edges of your property, in a tasteful manor, allows you greater visual control over our surroundings.
Its a wonderful thing when the lighting around your property can add both beauty and function.
We want beautiful accents of light that lend depth to our visual control over the scene outside our window.
We want to eliminate the dark pockets and areas where someone could see weakness. Casting soft lights over the key landscape elements around our properties eliminates the hiding places.
3. Be mindful of the neighbors
Bright powerful flood lights are great for lighting up a sport court. But they’re not so great for the neighbors who live around you.
Most have experienced what it’s like to have the neighbors houselights shine in their windows at night.
BUT security lighting can be beautiful, tasteful, and not upset everyone living nearby.
Indirect lighting that is shielded with shrouds and aimed properly, can help us be responsible and aware of what our lighting does to those around us.
For example, take a look at the photo above. We can see the effect, but not the light source.
Its the glare from a powerful light source that upsets the neighbors. However, soft accents of warmly toned lighting levels that have been aimed properly don’t bother anyone.
4. Functional task lighting adds to your security lighting
Task lighting serves a duel purpose: It can help us see our way, but it can also help us see trespassers.
Down lights shinning onto a pathway shows us where we are going and helps us avoid trip hazards.
However, down lights also help us see motion outside our windows at night.
Eighty percent of the year, beautiful landscape lighting is enjoyed from inside the home.
It creates a backdrop that extends your visual range well outside the four walls of the back dinning room.
Not only does landscape lighting turn our dark window panes into beautiful living portraits, it also adds an extra element of security.
5. Light your entryways
Entryways are where the greatest number of incidents tend to occur.
These are your home’s weak point. Especially places like the side or back door to the garage.
Trespassers don’t want to be seen. A light shining directly on a door will become a door they don’t want to approach.
Conclusion
There are different techniques and ways to increase your home’s security with lighting.
However, when it comes to security lighting for beauty and safety in mind, landscape lighting is one of the best security lighting approaches out there.
With security lighting, its not always about having the loudest or brightest lights in the neighborhood. It’s about having beautiful lighting accents that bring you piece of mind.
It’s important to mention that even the best security lighting is no replacement for a proper security system.
Security lighting serves as an extra measure, a way of reinforcing a clear message that your property is not worth the trouble.
Are you looking to learn more about security lighting for your own home?
Call (801) 440-7647 for more information or to schedule your free consultation. You can also simply fill out a contact form.
At Landscape Lighting Pro of Utah, the art of outdoor illumination is a real passion we work to perfect. Designing elegantly bespoke landscape lighting systems is simply all we do. For over 20 years, our award winning team of designers and craftsmen have striven to bring the best outdoor lighting experience possible to people’s homes and businesses across the Wasatch Front & beyond.
Located in Midvale, Landscape Lighting Pro of Utah installs, maintains, and repairs lighting systems throughout Utah’s residential areas, including Salt Lake City, Park City, Draper, Davis, and Utah Counties.
