The first thing that you need to do is figure out where you want to place your outdoor pole lights.  Pole lighting works best in areas where there is a lot of activity or that are highly trafficked.  Patios and decks are staple areas for these kinds of lights, but entrances to your home and highly trafficked areas, such as your driveway are also great targets depending on what type of mood you want to achieve.

Once you’ve decided where you want to place your light the next step will depend on what type of lighting fixture that you’ve decided to install.  If you are using solar outdoor garden lighting, all that you really need to do is stick your light in the ground and forget about it.  It will automatically charge up with the sun and turn on at night and off in the morning.  Just make sure that the light isn’t in the shade!

However, if you are installing low voltage lighting fixtures, you need to take a few additional steps, but it will also make your lighting more reliable.  First, you need to install a landscape light transformer, which will plug into a socket and convert the power from a shocking 120v to a friendly shock-free 12 volts.  This will usually be placed on the side of your house or deck.  After this is done, all that’s left is to run the wire to the light fixture that you’ve mounted and plug it in.  Make sure that you hide the cable though, to remove a trip hazard and prevent someone from knocking over your light pole.

Outdoor pole lights are a great way to add a lot of soft, functional light to any area that needs it.  Start thinking about adding some to your garden lighting plans today.

The answer to this question has a number of separate strands, but all ultimately derive from the intrinsic characteristics of LED lights. The most fundamental difference between a Light Emitting Diode and a traditional incandescent lamp is that while the latter is based on a simple electrical circuit that causes a resistive filament to heat up and thus glow, the former is a complex electronic device that has considerably more in common with a computer chip than a hot wire.

LED Garden Lights

LEDs produce light pretty much directly by exciting electrons which emit photons (light particles) as they transition between energy levels. Incandescent bulbs produce light as an incidental by-product of heat (about 90% of the electricity used is converted straight into heat not light).

This difference manifests itself in a number of ways. Most obviously, an LED consumes about ten times less electricity to create the same amount of light and converts very little of that electricity into waste heat. In short, they’re much more efficient and thus cost effective to run. That’s why they first started to appear in solar lights where the power supply is limited to the capacity of a rechargeable battery.

In the garden this yields another advantage, which is that because LEDs don’t give off heat they can be packaged in a variety of more interesting ways and located very close to plants and wooden structures without risk of causing damage or starting a fire.

While LEDs might be more complex in terms of the physics and manufacturing process, they are (again like computer chips) surprisingly robust yet also lightweight and, free from the stresses imposed by high fluctuations in temperature that regular lights suffer, last orders of magnitude longer. Features that again make them eminently suitable for outdoor use.

But perhaps the main reason that LED landscape lighting is fast becoming the dominant force in this field is simply the variety and quality of the light itself, with vibrant colors and effects not possible with regular lamps.