low voltage lighting

If you have ever been in a designer home during a parade of homes and loved how a certain room looked, you were probably exposed to the subtle beauty of low voltage lighting without even knowing it. There isn't much of anything that does a better job for creating a perfect mood in a room than low voltage lighting. Decorators love to layer different levels of light throughout a room to give it an overall feeling of calm or ambience. If you don't know how low voltage lighting works, it is actually fairly simple. A transformer is used to convert the basic 110 volts of electricity that is coming through your standard electrical outlet into approximately 12 volts of electricity. This amount of power flows through a specially designed cable to the lamp or lamps that then produce anywhere from 5 to 50 watts of light. Depending on the gauge of the cable, you can have more bright lights on it if that is what you want. The great thing is that you can have lamps with differing wattage on the same cable, so that you can design your lighting scheme with exactitude. The lumens in low voltage lighting are designed in such a way that they are much more focused than in regular incandescent lighting. The light is forced to mostly stay within the beam rather than spilling out into the area around the actual beam. This ability of the low voltage lighting lamps to focus based on the specific beam width of the light can help a designer use less light to illuminate exactly what they want. This way, they can accent with minimal or bright light certain accents or elements of the room. Another benefit of this is the energy that is saved. Not only are you saving energy up front with low voltage lighting, but you are also saving energy by using fewer lamps to do the same job. Energy savings are very important these days, as is saving money. It is nice to know that most styles of low voltage lighting can be quite affordable as well. In addition to the energy efficiency offered by low voltage lighting, these lights can work well on a dimmer so that the mood of the lighting can be changed as desired. They allow for a great deal of control and use quite small bulbs, which allow for smaller fixtures. This can mean the low voltage lighting will be practically invisible if you want that effect, or they can be designed for mood lighting in a very visible way if you prefer. All of this goes to say that you can pretty much do exactly what you want with low voltage lighting and save money at the same time. These suggestions on the use of this type of lighting were for indoor use, but you can use the same principles with low voltage lighting out of doors in your landscaping designs as you work to beautify your home with ambient lighting.

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