In this episode, John Maher speaks with Joe Malone, a master electrician with Cape Cod Heat Pumps and Electrical, about outdoor lighting solutions. Joe shares insights on designing functional and aesthetic lighting for driveways, walkways, and landscaping, including spotlighting unique architectural or garden features. They discuss security lighting options, low-voltage lighting benefits, and maintenance tips for outdoor systems. Joe explains how motion-activated floodlights and low-voltage landscape lighting can enhance safety and visibility. For more information, visit Cape Cod Heat Pumps and Electrical.
John Maher: Hi, I am John Maher and I’m here today with Joe Malone, master electrician with Cape Cod Heat Pumps and Electrical, an HVAC and electrical contractor in Marstons Mills, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, focused on detail, quality and professionalism. Our topic today is outdoor lighting services.
Welcome, Joe.
Joe Malone: Hey, John.
Approaching Outdoor Lighting Design
Maher: Yeah, so Joe, how do you approach outdoor lighting design? What is it that people are typically asking you to do these days?
Malone: So, right now the majority of any outdoor lighting that we run into a request that we get for adding lights is mostly task oriented. People want to light up their driveway that maybe wasn’t lit before, put in a post light somewhere so they can see the end of the driveway or see their mailbox or even have their friends find their house in the middle of the night.
There tends to be a lot of floodlights, spotlights so people can let the dogs out at night or the side of the driveway where they park was always dark. You have a teenager now that’s driving, you want to put in a floodlight. Is a lot of the smart security cameras that have the built-in floodlights. Those are quite popular right now. People want to see what’s going on around their house when they’re not around. So that’s been a pretty decent uptick in requests for those.
Integrating Outdoor Lighting Into Landscaping
Maher: Do you have any sort of rules that you go by in terms of integrating lighting into landscaping outside and how it up-lights that shine on a house or should it be down-lights and things like that?
Malone: Yeah, it all becomes an aesthetic. When you’re trying to light up for landscape lighting in particular, it’s are you trying to just set a mood of lighting around the property or are you trying to show off a beautiful spiral Japanese evergreen tree that you bought that is beautiful or Japanese red maple that you want to light? And in those cases you’ll have from-the-ground lighting up, spotlighting to highlight and draw your eye towards those particular items.
Maher: Mm-hmm.
Malone: If you want to just kind of wash the side of your house in lighting, sometimes you’ll light from the top down from an overhang behind your gutters. You’ll have a little spotlight that lights the side of the house up. Or a lot of folks will just have a softer light from the ground up, just kind of washing the side of the house in a soft light so you can see some nice architectural pieces, columns, those sort of things on the side of the house.
Walkway Lighting
Maher: Do you still see people doing those little lights that might be lining a walkway that goes up to the front of the house, something like that too?
Malone: Yep, those are nice because you can identify walkways, especially for a guest or people coming to your house. They can see where the walkway is and it’s just very nice visual appeal to kind of welcome someone to your houses. There’s light fixtures along a walkway just to literally light the way, the path to your home.
Outdoor Lighting for Security
Maher: What about for security? Are there certain types of lights that are best for security and making sure that you don’t have intruders near your home?
Malone: Generally speaking, any lighting on the outside of your house will tend to deter any criminal activity. The brighter it is, the better it is because people don’t want to be seen when they are trying to break into your home or break into your cars. So again, those with a motion light on a floodlight on a certain area, corners of your house, backyard, sides, the dark spots when you look at your home.
If you put a bright LED floodlight on those areas, as soon as anybody comes near it, these things will light up and everybody goes running the other way because they don’t want anyone to see them.
Low-Voltage Lighting Options
Maher: What is low-voltage lighting and when do you use that?
Malone: So low-voltage lighting is generally a landscape light type of light. You do that when you either don’t have the ability because of ground conditions or you don’t really want to dig a two-foot deep trench all around your entire property. Low-voltage lighting can go just beneath the mulch in your sod in your yard. It just is powered by a transformer that plugs in on the side of the house and you can control pretty much any little thing you want, run a whole bunch of little lights, different decorative fixtures all over the place. They’re a lot easier to install than, like I said, digging a two-foot deep trench all over your yard to put a couple of light fixtures in.
Maintaining Outdoor Lighting Systems
Maher: Right. That gets me into asking you about maintaining outdoor lighting systems. If you have to have those trenches and things, does that complicate things when it comes to maintaining or fixing issues if you do have issues with your outdoor lighting?
Malone: Yeah, if you have the higher-voltage lights that you, again, have to bury the wires deep beneath the ground, so if somebody was fixing a sprinkler head or planting some flowers, you want that high-voltage wire down away so nobody gets hurt. The low-voltage wires being right at the surface, if someone nicks them or whatever, it’s no big deal.
It’s an easy repair. It can be done safely and legally right there at the surface level. If you do have a wire that’s cut and you need to replace between one light fixture and another, it’s as simple as just scratching away the surface and running a couple of new wires.
Maher: All right, well that’s great information, Joe. Thanks again for speaking with me today.
Malone: Thanks for having me.
Information About Cape Cod Heat Pumps and Electrical
Maher: For more information, you can visit the Cape Cod Heat Pumps and Electrical website at ccheatpumps.com. Or call us, 508-833-HVAC. That’s 508-833-4822.