Landscape Lighting Technologies by Ingrid Wood

Landscape Lighting Technologies

Ingrid Wood, Wolf Creek Company

Technology makes our life easier and more fun! Home automation is trending, and technology plays an ever-bigger role in our green industry as well. There are so different landscape lighting options that it can get confusing. We want you to understand these options and be prepared when your clients ask for color enhancement or warmth settings with their lighting. Chuck Watterson gave a wonderful training at the ONLA Virtual Education Sessions this past January that helps shed light on the matter.

Why should you learn about landscape lighting? It is the way of the future and you want to stay in-the-know. And of course, adding lighting to your business means added revenue stream. You need to understand the differences between these lighting technology systems so that you can explain their benefits and sell these products to your clients.

LED and Colors Make Lighting Affordable and Fun!

Some homeowners may have seen Bluetooth or WIFI landscape lighting at a friend’s home and want to get their landscape lit. Other homeowners don’t even know they want this until they see it, and they may not even understand why they want it. But they know they want to be able to use their phone to control it. With the invention of LED, cost of leaving lights on has come down, so running lights at night does not cost the homeowner as much as it has in the past.

For the homeowner, effectively lit landscaping does not only provide security and safety, it also adds beauty and value to the property and expands their livable space. Lighting technology allows you to change the lighting color and mood. Homeowners can show off their sports team colors, add fun to a 4th of July party, or create a soft romantic setting for an intimate anniversary dinner.

Sample Project: Lighting the Front of a Home

Let’s do a sample project of lighting the front of a home with an entry way offset. The typical setup will need: garage 3 fixtures, 1-2 between garage and entry, the entry 2 fixtures, dining room 2-3 fixtures, for a total of 8-10 fixtures.

Adam Cornish, Territory Manager at our Cincinnati branch, explained this using the following scenarios: • Existing Lighting Upgrade with WIFI • Install on a Budget with Bluetooth • High-end New Install with WIFI • Upgrade Existing Lighting with WIFI

If there is existing lighting installed and the homeowner wants to add color enhancement and warmth settings, it is the easiest to retrofit the lamps. Each lamp connects independently to the internet router over WIFI. You will need:

• A modern router, made for the Internet of Things (IoT) • MR16 bullet or PAR36 large lamps, for example Chameleon from Brilliance. • To install the Brilliance app on your phone, or you can use

Alexa or Google Home.

Install on a Budget with Bluetooth

If no existing lighting is installed and the homeowner wants color enhancement on a budget, we recommend using Bluetooth technology. It is the simplest and most inexpensive way for the non-tech-savvy. Bluetooth does not use the internet; instead, the lights use built-in Bluetooth radio-waves to talk with your phone app. What you need:

• Integrated Bluetooth fixtures. There are many manufacturers—we use and like the Alliance lb400-bt fixture. • The manufacturer’s phone app. You can turn lights on and off, change color and lumens. • The Bluetooth Power Meters show the total watts used and available, and percentage of capacity used. If a homeowner wants to add lighting to dark spots, you can easily see what is possible. • The app is helpful with service calls. You can instantly see if all installed lights are operational.

If you want a larger installation, then make sure the fixtures have Bluetooth mesh technology. That technology works as a relay system and allows fixtures to talk as a group with your phone app.

Bluetooth Timers

The default app does not provide ability for timing. If the homeowner wants timing, then you will need to either add Bluetooth timers to the transformer or install a transformer with built-in timer (Allliance IT timer). This timer comes with its own app for scheduling.

High-end New Install with WIFI:

Homeowners drive the requests for this technology when they want to control their lighting when away from home. They often want this for the added security that lighting provides to their home.

High-end WIFI lighting technology provides much more functionality and is fully customizable. For example the FX Luminair ZDC system provides Zoning (Z), Dimming (D) and Color (C ). This is a true system; the Luxor transformer (150 or 300) provides all features built in. It can handle low volt and high voltage lights, so that you can also incorporate the existing post light on the sidewalk or sconce light by door. the WIFI system. The controller is the only part that needs a network, and that can be achieved using a ethernet wire, directly connecting to a phone, or over the WIFI. Contractors can see this is similar to an irrigation decoder system.

A free added cloud service allows a homeowner to connect to their system from anywhere through the internet, from their phone. Here a sample of features:

• Dimming control: adjust intensity from 0-100% • 40 custom lighting themes, using tunable whites and color scenes. • Select from 30,000 colors! • The Luxor app allows you to set up multiple sites. If the homeowner wants a change, you can do this from anywhere with WIFI. It is a huge timesaver. • Use 250 Groups for different zones around the home or for individual fixtures. For example, the homeowner wants only the entry path to the house lit during the night but not the rest of the landscape on the property. You can create a group for that, and set it to light at 50%, and job is done. • You can program Events for each day of the week that start certain themes to play at specific times, or select Sunrise or Sunset. • Tie multiple controllers together

“Lighting Up the Castle"

The images above show a demonstration installation of the Luxor system at Loveland Castle. This is not your average home, and as you can see, the tunable white at about 3000 Kelvin lights up the castle nicely. Also, typically when one uses colored lights, they lose intensity, but with Luxor’s lighting system there is no loss of intensity. B

Ingrid Wood is the Director of Marketing & eCommerce at Wolf Creek Company. She may be contacted at Ingrid.Janse-Wood@wolfcreekcompany.com