Contents

Lighting in the Home and Garden

Owen Jones

Table of Contents

How Lighting Can Provide Ambiance and Save Money

Using Discount Lighting In Your Home Decor

LED Lighting

The History of Making Candles

How to Add Warmth with Candles

How to Choose Bathroom Lighting

Kitchen Design and Lighting

Your Lighting Options When Remodelling Your Kitchen

What Makes an Ideal Kitchen?

How to Use Landscape Lighting to Great Effect

Garden Security Lighting

What to Consider When Choosing Greenhouse Lighting

Solar-powered Lighting

Solar Panels for Home or Business Energy

Artificial Bright Light

Deterring Burglars the Easy Way

Lighting in the Home and Garden

Illuminating Ideas for the Home and Garden

by

Owen Jones

Published by Megan Publishing Services

http://meganthemisconception.com

Copyright Owen Jones 2022 ©

Hello and thank you for buying this ebook called ‘Lighting in the Home and Garden’.

I hope that you will find the information helpful, useful and profitable.

The information in this ebook on various aspects of domestic lighting for decoration and security is organised into 16 chapters of about 500-600 words each.

I hope that this manual will interest those who are keen on using the inexpensive medium of lighting to increase the beauty and security of their home.

After reading this manual, you should be able to enjoy the nocturnal vista in your garden, and sleep safer in your bed, knowing that lights and alarms will alert you, your neighbours and the police, should you have burglars approaching your house.

Not only that, but your garden, no matter how beautiful it now is, will become an asset and an object of envy for you and your neighbours.

As an added bonus, I am granting you permission to use the content on your own website or in your own blogs and newsletter., although it is better if you rewrite them in your own words first.

You may also split the book up and resell the articles. In fact, the only right that you do not have is to resell or give away the book as it was delivered to you.

If you have any feedback, please leave it with the company you bought this book from.

Thanks again for purchasing this ebook,

Regards,

Owen Jones.

How Lighting Can Provide Ambiance and Save Money

There is no doubt that lighting has the biggest influence on atmosphere or that soft lighting in a bedroom or at a cosy dinner creates a romantic ambiance; bright, purposeful lighting in the office or kitchen shows that you mean business; dimmed lighting in the living room creates a calming atmosphere in which to watch a film or read a book.

Understated, back lighting behind flowers or a waterfall leads to a magical atmosphere, whereas severe floodlights turned on by a motion sensor would freeze most criminals in their tracks.

Getting the lighting wrong can have a seriously unfavourable effect on any room or occasion. Imagine a romantic dinner for two by candlelight and then imagine it by a naked 100 watt bulb hanging from the ceiling or a fluorescent tube.

It has been said that the average household can save at least twenty-five percent on its electricity bills by using lighting more effectively and therefore more efficiently. More importantly, you could save more than sixty percent, if you swap from the normal incandescent light bulbs to high-output compact fluorescent lights. Sixty percent is a huge saving for you, your country and your planet.

Here are some of the means by which you can obtain savings on the energy you currently use up on lighting.

Insert dimmers wherever you use lighting. You can put a touch lamp dimmer into the wiring of any lamp, so that when you touch it, it cycles from low, to medium, to high, to off. You will be surprised how often you will lower the light once you are able to, particularly in the case of desk or table lamps and standard floor lamps.

In a similar vein is the touch or turn switch that you can use to control lighting that traditionally hangs from the ceiling. You will be able to turn down the lights in any room and on the patio or deck too.

Photosensitive devices turn whatever they regulate off or on when the sun comes up. This is handy if you have motion-activated anti-intruder lighting. There is absolutely no need for it in the daytime, but you do not want to have to remember to switch it off in the mornings and reactivate it every night either.

Another use could be to turn the pond fountain off when it gets dark. All of these photosensitive switches can have over-ride switches too. These photosensitive devices will virtually half the cost of running the systems to which they are attached.

It is very easy to make fairly substantial savings if you put your mind to it. Just moving your furniture to take maximum advantage of natural light can help a lot too. Sitting near a window or in the garden to read the newspaper is far better than having to switch the kitchen light on to read it in there.

In the evening it is better to turn off all the main lights in the living room if you are watching television or reading a book and put one standard floor lamp just to one side behind you. It is sufficient to read by and to save your eyes from the strain of watching TV in the dark.

Using Discount Lighting In Your Home Decor

Lighting is the one, single most important means of altering the mood of any room. Therefore, it stands to reason that if you improve the lighting and appearance of your house, its value will also rise. Lighting improves any decor. However, you do not have to use expensive lighting, budget or discount lights are just as good in many cases.

There are thousands of kinds of lighting, at least one of which will go well with the sort of decor that you have. Lighting is best kept subtle. Up lighting, down lighting and back lighting are fantastic ways of illuminating objects in a room. The days of one pendant lamp hanging from a rose in the centre of the ceiling are long gone but if you do have to have one, at least put a dimmer on it.

Using many lights instead of one powerful light does not have to be more expensive. Typically, the one powerful light was a 100 watt bulb, so you could have four 20 watt wall lights and still save 20% on electricity. Or you could use one 40 watt bulb in a standard floor lamp or table lamp for reading or working and save 60% on your lighting bill.

Apart from the savings, a wrought iron floor or table lamp is far more beautiful that a pendant light. How about candelabra? You could make use of candelabra to startling effect, whether you use candles in them or small LED light bulbs.

Candles have made a big return too. Many people use candles for supplementary or even back-up lighting and candelabra are one of the hottest, latest trends. Interior designers are buying them up antique shops and painting them bright colours. You can see them in the photographs of the houses of many celebrities. A lot of people use candelabra in conjunction with aromatherapy too.

Another aspect of lighting is security. A well-lit house is less likely to be burgled than a dark house. Outside lighting can also play a key role in security precautions. External lighting that is controlled by movement or heating sensors to switch them on is the best means of discouraging burglars.

External lighting is the best deterrent, but it can also be beautiful. Back or up lighting on a water fall, a pond, a fountain or a beautiful arrangement of plants or bushes is amazing in the dark. Spotlights have a role to play in lighting up garden plants as well.

If you would like to give your fish free, organic meat to eat, put a floodlight or even an ultraviolet light at the pond side. If you switch it on for a few hours after dusk, hundreds of flies, moths and mosquitoes will be attracted to it and fall into the water, where your fish will be waiting for them.

You can have a lot of fun with lighting and the possibilities are infinite. Both indoor and outdoor lighting can enhance the beauty of your home and garden, but they also have practical uses: they enable you to see what you are doing and what other people are doing, which is why they are a good deterrent. Good lighting also makes anyone living alone feel safer.

LED Lighting

LED stands for light emitting diode. LED’s are not new; they are the small red or green lights on the front of your stereo that tells you that the power is on. Some consoles have quite a few of them to indicate the state of preparation of the equipment. However, there is a new wave of interest in LED lighting by manufacturers. There is talk of LED’s being the future of lighting. In fact, there always have been these rumours about LED’s, but nothing ever appeared to come of it.

This renewed interest in LED lights started in 2004 when vehicle manufacturers took another look at using LED lighting in car headlamps. In 2008, Lexus produced the first ever car, the Lexus 600, with LED headlamps. These cars were exported all over the world except for North America. However, the 600’s headlamps were or are not true LED headlamps; the main beam is still produced by filament bulbs.

The first authentic LED headlamps were fitted to the Audi V10 R8 sports car in 2000 and the first American automobile was the Cadillac Esplanade Platinum in 2009. However, there is an inherent issue with high power LED lighting; the rear of the diode produces a lot of heat. In fact, a group of high power LED’s produces enough heat to damage itself and melt the headlamp housing.

There are ways around this using heat sinks and cooling fans, but these answers are not perfect, so technicians and scientists are still searching for ways to resolve this problem. Conversely, the front of the LED lighting produces almost no heat at all, so if there is vapour in the headlamp unit and the ambient temperature is below freezing point, then ice crystals will form on the LED’s distorting and dampening the rays of light.

Nevertheless, scientists are sure that these teething problems will be overcome and that LED lights will one day be the most inexpensive type of lighting to use. In fact, it is already very economical to use and the LED lights units themselves last a long time. It is just the problem of overheating.

Other than their use in car headlamps, LED lighting units can be seen in flashlights and in other parts of cars. Manufacturers are using LED lighting more and more often in brake lights, flashing indicator lights and hazard warning lights, because there is no problem at all with these quite low powered lights.

LED lights used to be either green or red, but now it comes in more colours. White and blue are common. The coloured lights that you see under some cars are another example of LED lighting. They serve the useful purpose of making the car of motorbike more highly visible. All right, that may not be why they were fitted, but nonetheless they increase the vehicles’ visibility.

Many more uses will be found for LED lights over the coming years. You will find incandescent bulbs and even fluorescent tube lighting being phased out in favour of LED lighting as the issues are overcome, because LED lighting is still in its early years.

The History of Making Candles

People have been making candles for a very, very long time and so you can believe that there have been a lot of changes in the making of candles too. Perhaps the biggest revolution over all that time is the use to which candles are put. In the beginning, candles were used primarily for lighting and secondarily for heat, but these days they are used more for embellishment as in religious ceremonies and romantic dinners.

It is not entirely clear when the first candles were made or used, but fragments of clay candle holders were found in Egypt dating back to 4 BC. It is also known that candles were in use in ancient China and Japan. Those candles were made from oil extracted from insects and seeds. Meanwhile, taper candles were being burned in India made from the oil drawn by boiling cinnamon.

Candles were in use in America during the early years of the first century AD. Before that Native Americans probably