Is Professional Outdoor Lighting Actually Worth It? (It's Nothing Like $8 Solar Stakes)

You spent real money on a backyard you actually like, but it gets dark out before you really get to use it. Maybe you already tried to fix that with some of those solar stakes or path lights you can buy from any garden center. They probably worked okay, but you’re still curious if professional lighting would be even better. You got a professional lighting quote and now you’re trying to figure out whether it is worth the money or if it’s just an upsell.

My name is Randy Thompson, and I’m the founder of All-Out Hardscapes LLC here in Savannah and the Coastal Lowcountry. Over 10 years we’ve built more than 150 patios, walkways, and outdoor living spaces across the Lowcountry, from Wilmington Island to Savannah Quarters, and we install low-voltage landscape lighting on a lot of them. I’m a Techo-Bloc Pro certified installer. During my training I learned that lighting isn’t just an accessory on a patio. It needs to be part of the build.

Unfortunately I’ve also been on the wrong end of this one. I once spent $1,500 on lighting from a big-box store for my own house. Our lawn-care guy caught a fixture with the mower and the whole thing just came apart. Huge mess and a waste of money. That’s probably the same thing that’s happened to a lot of people around here as well, and it’s why they tend to flinch when I bring up professional lighting. So when I tell you professional low-voltage is nothing like that, it’s not a sales pitch. I’m comparing two things I personally paid for out of my own pocket.

Do I Really Need Professional Lighting, or Will $8 Solar Stakes Do?

The honest answer is that the $8 solar stakes put out enough light, it’s just that they don’t actually get you outside.

We will use our own house as the example here. We went two years in that house without once sitting in the backyard at nine o’clock at night. The yard wasn’t the problem. It was that by eight-thirty it turned into a dark hole and it wasn’t an inviting place to be anymore. The first night we sat out under a real lighting system, it was so peaceful that we sat there thinking about the two years of evenings we could have already had with just some lighting.

That’s the whole thing, and it has almost nothing to do with the actual brightness. Solar stakes are meant to mark a path. They simply show you where the walkway is. A designed lighting system is meant to do a lot more than that. It takes a patio you already paid for and gives you four to eight more hours a night, every night, after the sun goes down, to enjoy that space.

So the real question isn’t whether the cheap ones are bright enough. It’s whether good lighting makes you feel like you want to be out there. If the answer is yes, then a ton of stakes will not do the job.

Why Do Store-Bought Lights Keep Failing in My Yard?

We actually put $1,500 into store-bought lighting in our own backyard, so we can’t blame anyone for doing the same thing. Here’s what happened with those lights, and why it keeps happening to other people as well.

Our lawn-care guy came through and accidentally clipped one of the fixtures with the mower. It didn’t just stop working. It literally exploded. So then we were out in the grass trying to pick up all these little pieces, and the whole string of lights it was attached to was out as well. It definitely started to feel like a lot of money wasted on those lights.

Consumer fixtures and wire are built to be cheap. The housings are thin, the connections are made to be quick, not exactly durable, and the whole thing is designed around the idea that nothing will ever touch the fixtures. In a normal yard, the ground gets mowed, edged, rained on, and run through by dogs and kids, and maybe vehicles, so it’s not realistic to think that fixtures will stay undisturbed. And in Georgia, we’ve also got standing water and salt that takes a toll on things.

A professional system is built in a whole different way. It comes with heavier fixtures and connections that are made to stay sealed. Wiring is always sized for what it’s actually feeding. There’s also a transformer, the box that steps your 120-volt house power down to 12 volts, and it gets sized big enough that there’s room left over if you want to add more fixtures later without redoing the whole system. When a fixture does get damaged, and sooner or later one will, you just replace that one fixture. It doesn’t affect any of the other lights.

Is Running Low-Voltage Wire Safe Around My Kids and Dogs?

We hear this a lot, and people should say it out loud more often. People picture us out there running electrical wire through a yard where children and dogs spend their time playing.

Low voltage means exactly what it sounds like. The transformer takes your 120-volt house current and drops it to 12 volts before any of the wire even comes out of the box. That’s the same amount of power running the phone charging ports in your car. It’s very low power and it’s very safe, and that’s exactly why it’s used for landscape work in the first place.

It’s also why that big-box fixture just came apart when the mower found it. What we lost was a fixture and an afternoon.

The second half of this becomes more important as time goes by. A professionally installed system doesn’t leave wire lying in the grass where a mower or an edger can get to it. The runs get planned before anybody digs, they get buried, and they get routed around the parts of the yard that would be mowed or trimmed. That’s the big difference between a system your lawn crew never thinks about and a system your lawn crew is constantly tearing up.

Real Outdoor Lighting Works With Shadow, Not Brightness

Here’s the part hardly anybody in the Lowcountry has ever seen done correctly, and it’s why people don’t realize just how important lighting is. A lot of people think that patio lighting will be like a floodlight on the wall that makes the backyard way too bright and feel kind of like a parking lot.

Up-lighting, which means a fixture set low and aimed upward at something, isn’t about brightness at all. It’s all about the shadow. If you set a light at the base of a live oak, the shadows from the trunk and the limbs are splashed on the side of the house. If you put one behind a palm, the fronds show up on the wall. You’re not lighting the yard. You’re using the yard’s own shapes to create interesting art, and the shadows are doing as much work as the light.

That’s all about the design, not about what kind of fixture you buy or how much it costs. This is where experience really shows. Move a fixture in toward the trunk and the shadow stretches taller. Move it out and it shortens and softens. On a two-story house you want the throw long enough to go all the way up the wall. On a single story with a lower roof you keep it tighter so it doesn’t get lost above the roofline. Same fixture, but just tweaking it a little gives a completely different result. That gets decided by where somebody stood when they aimed the light.

Color temperature does a lot of the work as well. Color temperature is measured in Kelvin, which is just a number describing how warm or cool a light looks. We run 2800K to 3200K. That’s golden. Not quite white, but not quite yellow either. If you go colder than that it makes brick look gray, siding look blue, and the whole house look like some kind of institution when it gets dark. With the right warmth the same brick goes warm and the landscaping stays green instead of going flat or gray. That’s the gap between a yard that’s lit and a yard that has a mood.

What Am I Actually Buying for the Money?

Let’s talk about money honestly, because this is where people get suspicious, and they should.

We’re not going to give you a per-fixture price here, because a lighting quote depends on a lot more than just the fixtures. Four main things are what determine an estimate:

• How many fixtures you will need
• What’s being lit, since a two-story facade needs different fixtures than a walkway
• How far the wire has to run from the transformer to the far corner of the yard
• Whether the work is going to be done while the patio is being built or after everything is installed and planted

Those four things are what contribute the most to your estimate.

What we can tell you is how we decide whether to put lighting in front of you at all. We’re not going to sell you something that doesn’t give you real value for your money. There’s always room for enhancement on a project, but you have to decide whether the enhancement is worth the money. Lighting earns its spot because the math is so simple: if it gives you four to eight more hours of use per night on a space you already bought, and you use them, it absolutely pays for itself.

Here’s the other pattern we’ve noticed, based on how these projects go. Somebody comes in planning to spend $10,000 and the finished project lands at $15,000. Somebody plans $15,000 and lands at $20,000. That’s not because we are talking people into things they don’t need. That’s just what happens when people start imagining what’s possible in their own backyard and they decide the difference is worth it. Your job is to challenge us and make us justify every one of those steps. Our job is to tell you when the honest answer is no.

Should I Run the Lighting With the Patio or Add It Later?

You can add lighting to a finished yard, we do it all the time. But the cheapest, easiest time to do it is while the patio is being built, and we’d rather you know that before you decide.

While a job is open, the ground is already dug up, the crew and the equipment are already on site, and wire can be routed under and around the patio and walkways while everybody still has access. Once the pavers are set, the beds are planted, and the sod is down, you have to dig all that up to go back and run the wire later.

That’s why we talk about lighting on every single job, a habit that came straight out of our Techo-Bloc training. People are out on their patios at nine o’clock at night and entertaining until 10:30 or 11 or later sometimes. It doesn’t make sense to build a space for entertaining that can’t be used after it gets dark. On average that means you’re using it for around two hours instead of six.

Saying no to adding lighting is a perfectly good answer. We just want to make sure you know that it’s much cheaper to do it in the beginning than it is to add it later. And we don’t want you to realize in October that the fire pit you love can’t really be used after 8 at night.

When Is Professional Lighting Not Worth It for You?

We’d rather lose an add-on than put something in your yard that sits there unused, so here’s when we tell people to pass on it.

If you really don’t use your patio at night, don’t buy it. A lot of people are in bed by nine, or the backyard is mostly for the dog and the trash cans, which is perfectly fine. Lighting doesn’t necessarily make you want to go outside at night. It just makes it possible if you already like to be outside at night.

If the budget is tight and the lighting money would come out of the stone base that goes under the pavers, it’s not worth the sacrifice. What goes under your patio is more important than what’s above it. Lighting can always be added later. But if you skimp on the base, that can’t be fixed without pulling up the whole patio.

If all you need is to see the walkway so nobody trips or hurts themselves taking out the trash, the $8 solar stakes are perfect for that. That’s what they’re designed for. They just aren’t the thing people think they’re buying when they say outdoor lighting.