The Lowdown on High-Efficiency Outdoor LED Strips
How you choose to illuminate your home can significantly affect your interior and exterior design. What kind of lights you use, where you position them, their colour, shape, and size – it all plays a part in the bigger picture and can make everything look better or take away from your carefully designed spaces.
Many people, when thinking of creative ways to light up their house, focus on the indoors only while the outdoor area gets a floodlight and maybe a lantern or two. However, if you want to spice up the outside of your house, no matter if it’s the patio, the garden, or something else, lights can really help you out, especially LED strips!
LED strips are great for indoors and are generally used to accent important spaces or to create a focal point in a room. Outdoors, they have a similar purpose. However, since you can’t use indoor LEDs outside, you’ll need to buy specialized outdoor LED strip lights to get started with the decorating project.
Before you go and get your outdoor LED strip lights though, you need a plan as to where you’re going to put them. Here are a few ideas!
Walkway & Stairs: Create a Grand Entrance
A floodlight is always a great item that provides visibility and safety, but it doesn’t really add much to the style department. You should definitely keep your floodlight, as style is not above safety, but make sure you set its timer appropriately so that it’s not the only light you’re using.
Before the time comes for the floodlight to come on, you can opt for a more stylish look created by LED strip lights! Outdoor LED lights are great as they are usually powered by batteries and don’t require to be plugged in. This gives you total freedom in placing them and arranging the light exactly where you’d like it.
One idea is to create a fairytale front yard by framing the walkway leading up to your house with LED strips on both sides. A framed walkway is a really popular way of using LED strips among homeowners. It will really make your house stand out, will add a touch of magic, and will also provide enough visibility to walk up and down at night.
If you’d like to take things a bit further you can also use LEDs to put under the stairs leading to your front door and continue the extraordinary flow of light. You can use an LED tape lights for this purpose as they have a strong adhesive that will make sure they won’t be affected by the movement happening around them and won’t come off.
Patio: Relaxation and Safety In One
Patios can be a bit tricky to illuminate as they are a versatile space and can be used for a lot of things, from sitting around and spending time together to movie nights and cookouts. Each of these happenings requires a different amount of light, with some needing more and some needing next to no light.
LED strips can really answer this challenge as they are as versatile as the patio itself! For example, you can get LED strips that can have the option to subdue the light or enhance it when needed. This is a very useful option in areas like the patio, where, as we said, different things can happen!
Another thing that you might find useful is the orange light option some strips have. The orange light is usually used to keep bugs like mosquitoes away, which will make sure your nights are relaxed and uninterrupted by annoying buzzing and itching.
Furthermore, LED strips won’t bother the eyes like an overhead light might, which will only add to the laidback atmosphere. You can either use them to frame the patio itself or create a focal highlight point that will serve as the main light source.
You can also get creative as you know your patio best and use the LED strips in any other way to improve the look and vibe of your patio! Maybe use your patio furniture as a starting point and see where it takes you!
Garden: Your Own Personal Fairytale
Finally, we have the garden. You might find it a bit weird to add LEDs to such a space, but trust me when I say that if you actually do it you’ll be more than pleased!
A garden is a magical place all on its own, especially if you’re growing luscious flowers and beautiful plants and know how to take care of them. Outdoor LED tape lights will just enhance the beauty of your garden during the night, turning a scene from a fairytale into a real-life situation.
Since LED strips are slim they won’t be visible during the day and since you’re getting outdoor ones you won’t have to worry about them being affected by anything you need to do to maintain your garden. These LEDs are specially designed to withstand the elements so no amount of water or dirt will take them down!
If you’re wondering how to position them, you have a couple of options. If you have bushes, like a rose bush, for example, you can wrap them around it to draw the eye to it and highlight the blossoms during the night. Another thing you can do is line your garden with LEDs to illuminate everything within.
If you want to and have the space, you can create a little seating space in the midst of it and add LEDs there. I guarantee you it will quickly turn into your favourite place to sit and take the fresh night air in!
