We can offer you whatever type of lighting you need to properly uplight your house or landscaping. Since we are a licensed general contractor, we can offer you high voltage lighting as well as low voltage lighting.
We were proudly selected by the Reserve HOA several years ago to remove the under-sized low voltage lighting system installed by another landscaping company and replace it with a high voltage lighting system to uplight the Large Willow Oak tree in their community. It is the largest Willow Oak tree in the state of North Carolina. It is a focal point tree in the center of their community that has a span of a football field, a trunk diameter of approximately 25′ long, and a height of almost 100′ tall. It is a grand tree that low voltage lighting just could not handle.
Low voltage lighting is fine for uplighting your house and your typical ornamental focal point trees, but if you have very large trees, you may need to use high voltage light fixtures. We will design and install the system that you need to create the look you want, not just the one that is the cheapest or easiest to install. When we uplight a tree, we uplight the entire tree, not just one side of the trunk like 90% of our competitors. The thing about lighting is that is artistic and subjective. It either creates the desired effect, or it doesn’t. Most of our competitors focus on using inexpensive fixtures and a minimum of fixtures for their lighting designs with the purpose of getting the work based upon the lure of the cheap price that they are offering. We focus on achieving the artistic look, and design the number fixtures in order to create it. We would rather the customer eliminate the number of things to illuminate then to reduce the number of fixtures. We feel that it is better to choose quality than quantity. We have found that we typically propose the use of more fixtures with a much wider array of fixtures and lamp styles than our competitors because of this. When getting lighting quotes, it is necessary to get the artistic effect that the designer is proposing, the number of fixtures needed to create it, and the warranty that the installer will provide on the system in order to compare them.
We prefer to use fixtures that are higher quality and made much more durable so they will provide the customer a much longer life. Most of the typical fixtures are made of a cheap aluminum and only carry a 1 – 3 year warranty. The fixtures that we use carry a minimum 10 year warranty. Many of them have a limited lifetime warranty.
Many of our competitors still use halogen lamps which are much less expensive on the up-front costs, but consume much more power and require much more maintenance than the new LED lamps. The old halogen lamps operate under a much higher wattage and operate within a much narrower voltage parameter which means that if the fixtures aren’t installed perfectly using hub technology, the voltage can be above or below the design parameters which causes the bulbs to burn out prematurely, then as each one burns out (because they consume so much wattage) they cause a voltage spike that builds and builds until they all burn out. This can become expensive in lamp replacement maintenance costs, not to mention all the time consumed to buy and replace the lamps. The LED lamps consume approximately 1/7 of the wattage of a halogen lamp and they operate within a voltage parameter that is 3 times wider than the halogen lamps. This allows the lamps to operate in a much wider voltage range which reduces the critical design layout of the fixtures and if a lamp burns out, the voltage spike is so minimal that it won’t exceed the voltage parameter and cause the other lamps to burn out in a domino effect. The other advantage of LED lamps is that they burn much cooler and are less likely to cause fires as we have seen with halogen lamps.
Another major difference in our lighting systems is the lighting controls. Most of our competitors use a simple analog timer to control their lighting systems. This technology is way out-dated. Those timers loose track of time easily and before you know it, the lights are coming on during the day and are turned off at night. We use either digital timers with battery back-up in combination with photo cells or astronomical timers. Both of these systems can retain their time and adjust themselves for the changing daylight hours throughout the seasons. This saves money on power consumption by minimizing the system run-time and saves you the maintenance time of constantly having to adjust the lighting controls.
In most situations, when low voltage lighting is sufficient to achieve the desired look, we can offer you quality products and a quality installation. We have teamed up with the nation’s largest lighting manufacturer’s and distributors that can provide us with an array of quality, professional grade lighting products; many of which offer the highest warranties in the industry. Their warranties on the fixtures (which are no less than ten years) combined with our lifetime warranty our installation workmanship means you will be given the highest warranties in the industry. We also install quality LED lamps in all of our fixtures which will use 1/7 of the wattage of a typical Halogen bulb and last about 10 times longer (average of 20-30 years). If you buy a lighting system through us, it will most likely be the last system you will ever purchase and will practically never need to mess with it.
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