Journal
Seven landscape lighting mistakes on South Florida homes
Most bad landscape lighting is not cheap lighting. It is expensive fixtures pointed the wrong way. Almost every rescue job we do comes down to the same handful of errors.
Last updated |7 minute read
1. Lighting the whole wall
A wide flood aimed at a facade erases the texture that made the facade worth lighting. Stucco, coral stone, and cut block only read when light grazes them at a shallow angle from close to the wall.
Good facade work is a series of narrow beams placed close in, not two floods placed far out.
2. The wrong color temperature
4000K and above turns warm stucco grey and makes plant material look dead. Everything we install on residential exteriors is 2700K, and it stays 2700K across every fixture on the property.
Mixed temperatures are the single most obvious sign of a system built one fixture at a time over ten years.
3. Runway path lights
Evenly spaced path lights down both sides of a walk read like an airstrip. Path lighting should be offset, staggered, and used to mark direction changes and grade changes, not to trace a straight line.
Fewer path lights, placed where a foot actually needs information, always looks better.
4. Glare you can see from the street
If you can see the source, the design failed. Every uplight needs a shroud, a hex louver, or enough setback and aim that the visible element is the lit surface and not the diode.
This is also the fastest way to a complaint from a neighbor or an HOA.
5. Palms lit like oak trees
A palm is a trunk and a crown, not a canopy. One narrow beam up the trunk into the underside of the crown does more than three wide beams from the base.
Royal and queen palms usually take two fixtures. Small sabals take one. Anything more starts to look like a car dealership.
6. Undersized wire and one giant run
Voltage drop is why the far end of a run looks dim and amber while the near end looks white. Long runs need heavier gauge and split home runs, not a bigger transformer.
We size wire to the run and leave loops at each fixture so the system can be adjusted later without a shovel.
7. No plan for growth
South Florida plant material moves fast. A fixture aimed perfectly in March is buried in ficus by August.
That is what the $49 per month maintenance plan is for: seasonal re-aiming, lens cleaning, connection checks, and adjustment as the landscape fills in.