Tucson is known for its beautiful landscapes, so it makes sense that you’d want yours to be seen. Many spend hundreds on landscapers, only to realize that their hard work and effort will be hiding in the dark during the evening. If you’d like your landscape to shine, no matter what time it is, here are tips to keep in mind.

Ask Yourself, “Why?”

What’s the purpose of your landscape lighting? Are you trying to create a specific mood or light up a pathway for safety reasons? It’s better to figure out if you want lighting for aesthetic or practical reasons before investing in lighting. With proper planning, you can even have a combination of both.

Study Your Yard

The amazing aspect of landscape lighting is that you can virtually light up any element in your yard. Flowers, bushes, trees, statues, benches—all of them reflect light or absorb it. Analyze your yard and determine how many elements you can light up.

Make Decisions

The last thing you want to do is buy landscape lighting in Tucson, AZ and decide later where it should go. Think about how you want your yard to look and plan accordingly. Soft moods can be created by placing exterior light fixtures under shrubs. Water fountains and statues are perfect for spot lights. You can decide to place light around ponds, pools, benches, and more.

Hire a Professional

Professional lighting experts can help you execute your vision properly and safely. With their help, your landscape lighting will last much longer than your average DIY project. Check out showrooms in Tucson to speak to lighting designers and get started on your lighting project. For exterior lighting fixtures in Tucson, AZ, visit Premier Lighting.

Are your exterior lights dimly casting shadows or do they shine brightly, welcoming visitors to your front door? Whether you live in Tucson or close to Scottsdale AZ, it is important to choose the right fixtures and install them correctly for effective outdoor light. Here are some tips to help you get the most from your outdoor light fixtures.

Porch Lights

For porch lighting, the size of the house is not as important as the front door. Lights should balance out the door size. In other words, if you have a standard single door, go with a fixture somewhere between five and nine inches in width. For larger doors, you may want to increase this size. If you want light on each side of the door, keep them identical and at the same size.

Ceiling Light Fixtures

Although you usually see them indoors, ceiling lights are a good idea for porches and covered patios. They lend a personal touch to your outdoor decorating efforts and can make your visitors feel welcome and at home. There are many selections to choose from when you visit a lighting specialty showroom and store.

Bringing the Light Down

If you want more light from your fixtures, consider something like glass pendant lights. For small spaces like porches, mini pendant fixtures are a good choice. They provide plenty of welcoming light without taking up too much space.

LED Address Lights

House number lights are perfect for welcoming out-of-town guests or delivery people. You can find these selections and a wide range of indoor and Outdoor Light Fixtures when you come to Premier Lighting. We have showrooms in Tucson, and we serve the Phoenix area in nearby Scottsdale AZ.

Tucson is surrounded by nature and homeowners are constantly looking for ways to spend time outside, both in the morning and evening. When it comes to finding the right exterior light fixtures in Tucson, AZ, it’s important for homeowners to research exactly what they need in a wide range of prices and styles.

You need a lighting design team to work closely with you to understand your goals for the space. Do you want to entertain after dark in this area? Do you want to improve home security? Are you considering just want to add some aesthetics to the space? It’s a lighting designer’s goal to ensure you have exactly the options right for your project.

Finding Outdoor Lights Near Me

Tucson lighting design companies need to have a wide range of exterior light fixtures to meet any need, look, or style you are after.

Exterior Lighting Design Tips

Home decor products can work well to enhance security by lighting paths or doorways. They can also add a lot of style to your space. Landscape lighting can enhance your outdoor water feature or place a significant amount of light on a statute, layout, or garden area. Outdoor light fixtures can also help you improve the movement of people through your space. Lighting pathways around the garden, for example, can give people an idea of where they should walk.

How We Help

When you buy exterior light fixtures in Tucson, AZ that Premier Lighting offers, you can expect outstanding quality, beautiful details, and designs for contemporary, traditional, modern, and even ultra-sleek homes. Our team is happy to work closely with you to determine which style fits your goals. This may include styles for smaller homes or large, sprawling estates. You do not have to feel limited when it comes to lighting your home’s exterior.

Contact Premier Lighting today.

Homes without security systems fall victim to crime 75% more often than other properties. Burglars prefer properties that obscure the view of passers-by, but lighting strategies aren’t all created equal. Professor Marcus Felson says this about effective security lighting:

• It should be visible enough to alert neighbors to crime.
• It should not give burglars enough light to function easily.
• Lights should be attached to motion sensors to give the impression that residents are home and awake.

The contradiction in those three functions may be behind the patchy results of most security lighting studies. Bright floodlights encourage crime rather than deter it. When public schools in Texas removed all their outdoor lighting in the Seventies, vandalism all but evaporated, but technology has moved forward since then. It’s now possible to use light to your advantage.

Mimicking Life

Automated and infrared lights cut down on energy costs while effectively deterring crime. Timers that turn indoor lights on one room at a time create the impression of movement and don’t provide enough lighting to make life easier for thieves. In rural and secluded areas where visibility is always obscured, lights help rather than hinder thieves, so strategies must vary according to what passers-by can see from the street. Since burglars tend to target the same property multiple times, your security strategy should be proactive and adjusted if crimes do occur.

The Limitations of Light

Lighting’s power over your safety is limited because the vast majority of burglaries happen in summer, with a mere 35% occurring at night. Neighborly connections are thus one of the most effective ways to combat crime. When property owners are aware of one another’s schedules and vacations, unusual activity is easier to spot. A sense of community might be old fashioned, but it’s as efficient as it’s always been.
Premier Lighting wants you to feel safer. Visit our website or showrooms to view products that give you and your family peace and comfort.

Using excessive floodlighting erases all the exquisite architectural details of houses and buildings. Unless you are lighting an athletic field, floodlights are intended to invite people indoors, not obliterate every sliver of curb appeal you’ve created, so subtlety is critical. Spotlights are the perfect solution to this problem, adding restraint and emphasis to carefully chosen areas without obliterating your home’s aesthetics.
LED layering adds dimension, depth, and focus to décor. Spotlights and floodlights have a symbiotic relationship: both take care of aesthetics and utility in their own way, but neither can work alone.

Forming Your Base

Floodlights are the canvas of your light palette. They have a maximum beam spread of 120 degrees, so they don’t make adequate task lights. The larger your beam width and the farther your distance, the wider the area it will light. You can use 60 degree floodlights to light smaller zones like shop windows or entrances, but they will never create enough depth if used alone.

Creating Dimension

Spotlights have a beam angle of about 25 to 45 degrees. They’re the highlights of your light palette, so they accent design features and provide security lighting. They can light an entire room if recessed at several points, and they introduce elements of line and hue that floodlights can’t achieve. Recent innovations have led to a huge array of new, intensely colored, warm LED shades that make them as important to your decor palette as the art on your walls.

Working Together

Spotlights left without a floodlight base will get lost in large areas. A range of bullet and lateral wash fixtures will help you to soften and direct your floodlights so that they draw the eye from spotlight to spotlight. To achieve the necessary subtlety, use your light to paint color and depth onto your space.

Looking for outdoor lighting? The experts at Premier Lighting can help you figure out what works best for your home.

Self-powered bulbs, subtle new hues, and exquisite accent downlighting techniques transform your swimming pool into a watery wonderland.
Lighting your property’s pool no longer means merely choosing the right shade of blue. Design possibilities are innovative and flexible. The mood of your outdoor area is no longer set in stone because today’s multi-tone bulbs give you complete control of ambiance throughout the day.

Creativity with LED

Whether your old pool needs a makeover or you’re installing a new one, LED keeps your lighting economical and attractive. In its early years, these bulbs were known for their inability to reproduce warm tones, but today, they won’t constrain you, even if you want them to mimic halogen’s warmth.
Warm contrasts will set off the cool colors of your pool. They can be achieved by lighting your fire pit or pool surroundings in ochre and other autumn hues. Downlights hidden beneath stairs and other features will provide further accents. 2018 is seeing a resurgence of faux-antique lanterns and small firepits placed casually around the border of the pool.

Lighting Water

Intelligent lighting can change automatically depending on the time of day. By aiming your lights towards the center of the pool rather than outwards, the hue of your bulbs will be more intense. Omnidirectional lights can create interesting shapes in the water or introduce a new layer of light.

Working with Color

Create light layers to vary intensities and create new, interesting tones. Layering red and blue will create violet, while layering all three primary hues will create white.

Your home’s swimming pool can be the most atmospheric part of your landscaping. The experts at Premier Lighting can incorporate your lighting with your architecture. Contact them today.

Deep teal and royal blue have crept into the décor world with much fanfare this year, but until now, layered lighting for these rooms has been a challenge. LEDs with enough blue hue to make an impact tend to be inefficient because light on the cool side of the spectrum is short wave. For this reason, Cree Inc’s new XLamp XP-G3 is a significant achievement. As the most efficient royal blue light on the market, it manages to double the maximum output of rivals without costing you any wall plug efficiency.

Where Horticulture and Architecture Meet

The LED isn’t merely a breakthrough for the décor world, but for horticultural and architectural applications, too. The PPF efficiency of the new XP-G3 light is 50% greater than traditional grow lights, at 13 µmol/s PPF and 3402 megawatts of radiant flux. The light is optimized specifically to encourage the horticultural sector to take another look at what LED can do for their crop yields, both directly and by improving soil respiration and carbon dioxide levels. Remote sensing capabilities are just as crucial, but until now, the power consumption of high-pressure sodium lights made it expensive to all, but the largest horticulturalists.

The Aesthetics of Blue

If your concerns are aesthetic rather than technical, the improved radiant flux will scatter a more concentrated layer of color over a wider area without pushing up utility bills. Blue lighting is typically used to display the linear design of a building, and its landscaping because it brings out the warmth of stone and bricks. The XP-G3 will allow you to light tighter areas than you ever could before without creating hot spots. Whether you’re using LED lighting to create architectural accents or to “paint” with light, Cree’s new model will inspire you.

Premier Lighting keeps up with the latest lighting news and trends so you don’t have to. Visit their site to give your home’s lights the upgrade they need.

Sustainable building design is an art as much as it is a science, and lighting is one of its core challenges. The Energy and Resources Institute’s manual, “Sustainable Building Design” recommends a subtle approach to exterior lighting. Key problems include poorly shielded lights, too much brightness, and too many lights. Optical control that’s as subtle as it is thoughtful will deliver on aesthetics and energy efficiency.

Plan your lighting according to:
• Glare
• Security
• Safety
• Energy efficiency.
• Color palettes

Wasted light improves none of these aspects, but it does interfere with the biological cycles of plants, people, and pets. Computer modeling allows architects and designers to evade light pollution and plan lighting styles to achieve goals efficiently. Less is more, especially when it comes to light.

Achieve subtlety and efficiency by:
• Illuminating smaller areas only when light is needed.
• Avoiding light that is bright enough to obscure pathways.
• Projecting light upward with accent and sign lighting.

No project succeeds without careful planning, so know the objectives of every light you place and aim for the minimum levels. Clearly illuminated zones with accented hazards and safety zones for your children are best. Make use of layers to achieve contrast, and highlight key areas. Choose low ambient light so that accents have enough contrast.

Lighting is like any art: clutter is neither beautiful nor useful.

Energy efficient re-lamping can be achieved more economically by choosing new bulbs that fit into old fittings. Conversion kits are rarely needed. Today’s most effective lamps for exterior lighting are mercury vapor, metal halide, and sodium vapor lamps. To reduce light pollution, cut-off luminaires and low reflectance bulbs can be placed at ground level. This will also eliminate glare.

Premier Lighting can help make sure your outdoor lighting is safe and stylish. Check out their showrooms around the valley or visit their site today.