Outdoor Home Lighting

We all have outdoor home lighting. We all need outdoor home lighting. It's required by most ordinances. It allows us, our family and our friends to move about safely at night. This is the positive side of outdoor lighting. Done properly, outdoor lighting can dramatically enhance the nighttime beauty of our home or business. Unfortunately, much residential and commercial lighting is not done properly. It seems that many folks (architects & lighting designers included) think that more is better. This simply is not the case. Too much outdoor lighting is often worse than not enough lighting. It can cause glare which reduces our visibility. It can create light trespass which infringes upon the rights of our neighbors. It can was incredible sums of money and valuable natural resources.

Light Right at Night!

Good Outdoor Home Lighting Fixtures

The night sky friendly outdoor lights shown above would be a major improvement towards fixing the problem displayed below... and a great first step towards implementing our Outdoor Lighting Guidelines.

A Bad Outdoor Home Lighting Example

Here's an example of a "typical" suburban home. There are no less than 10 lights on the exterior of this home. These are generally on dusk to dawn... though periodically, they're left on during the day as well. Since this image was originally taken, they've added a dozen or so post mounted fixtures around the entire perimeter of the property. Not near the driveway... not near the walkway... circling the entire property. What could they possibly be hoping to accomplish with a post mounted light fixture in the middle of a flower garden?

How would one go about fixing this? First, I'd suggest reducing the number of lights to a reasonable number. Next, I'd replace each of the remaining glare bombs with some good outdoor light fixtures... like those available at your favorite night sky friendly outdoor lighting retailer, Starry Night Lights!