If you have some great outdoor features on your property you may wish to enjoy them in the evening. If so, you’ll want to invest in some lighting and low voltage garden lights offer all kinds of benefits. Here are some of the good things you will discover with this kind of lighting.
What are Low Voltage Garden Lights?
When you install yard or garden lights on your property, you have several choices. You can use standard 110/120 volt house current, solar or low voltage lights. Low voltage lights work with much less current than house current lights. In fact, it is as low as 12 volts. This can be achieved with batteries but it would not be cost effective. Instead, a transformer is used to lower the current from 120 volts to 12 volts. Now let’s take a look at the benefits of this kind of lighting system.
Safety
If you accidentally come in contact with house current you could be seriously injured or even killed. However, low voltage garden lights will not hurt you. You may feel a slight tingle if you are shocked.
Most modern low volt systems utilize LED lighting. This is relatively new for yard lights and this type of bulb is cool to the touch. LED is an important feature if you have young children or accident prone adults on the premises. Standard light bulbs get hot enough to burn or even catch fire, so you eliminate burn injuries and many fire hazards with low voltage garden lights.
Cost
If you install a lot of outdoor lights, it can raise your monthly electric bill a great deal. Your new low volt system will use much less electricity than standard lighting because LED lights are far more efficient. In fact, with the savings on power, you can afford to install additional low voltage garden lights on your landscape.
There is another cost consideration with LED lighting. LED bulbs last much longer than standard bulbs. In fact, you can get as much as ten thousand hours or more on some LED bulbs. This will result in a substantial savings over time.
Installation
When you install a standard lighting system out of doors, you need to know a great deal about electricity and local building codes. This is a job usually done by an experienced electrician or lighting professional. However, installing low voltage garden lights is not dangerous because the system uses only 12 volts. You can plug the transformer into an outdoor electrical outlet and the rest of the installation process is not difficult.
