A beautifully landscaped garden is a treat for family and guests alike, but even more so when the escape can be carried past daylight hours and into the night. To get there requires the inclusion of landscape lighting in your garden design, a prospect once considered frustrating to implement and prohibitively expensive. The good news is that there is a convenient, easy-to-install and cost effective solution in the form of inexpensive landscape lighting kits. The bad news is that, if you don’t know their limitations, you could wind up very disappointed with your results.
Low cost landscape lighting kits such as those manufactured by companies like Malibu Lighting are, in principle, a great idea. Their plastic construction offers several advantages over designer, metal counterparts. But along with those advantages come a few disadvantages you may not be aware of, and that’s what could lead to a big letdown. We’ll go over the good, the bad and the ugly but, as you read this article, I ask you one favor; don’t make up your mind until you’ve reached the end.
Let’s get the ugly out of the way first as it’s really the easiest to cover. Plastic landscape lighting kits aren’t pretty. I don’t mean to imply that they are repulsive, just that their low-cost manufacturing and molded plastic parts lack the variety and intricate design options you might find in their metal counterparts.
Inexpensive kits will almost always be made of plastic which means you’ll get a dime-a-dozen design at a baker’s-dozen discount. Forget about variety in the kit. Your set will include a bunch of lights that all look the same. Unless, of course, you buy a kit containing both path lights and spotlights in which case all the path lights will look the same and all the spot lights will look the same. But let’s face facts here; if you want to save money, stylish independence is a fairly small sacrifice to make.
As for the “bad” element, there really is only one you need be aware of and that’s brightness (or, more accurately, the lack thereof). The culprit here is the very material these lights are made of. Plastic, as you may have noticed, melts at much lower temperatures than metal. That lower melting point limits the wattage of bulbs that can be used in plastic landscape lighting kits. Higher wattage equates to greater heat. If you aspire to a brightly illuminated garden and want to paint sculpture with light then you’ll most likely have to shell out the extra coin for metal lights.
With the ugly and the bad out of the way, let’s cover the good and discuss why you might actually want to consider landscape lighting kits. The first plus, which we’ve already touched on, is price. But what exactly do we mean by inexpensive. Well, to put it into perspective, let’s use Malibu (mind you, there are other great kit manufacturers out there, I’m just using them for convenience) as an example. Malibu manufactures a 20 light plastic kit with power pack and cable included which retails for around $60USD. They also manufacture a metal kit with only 6 lights which retails for just shy of $120USD. So there’s your frame of reference; less than half the lights for around twice the price.
There’s another hidden benefit to plastic landscape lighting kits inherent in their plastic construction and that’s replacement costs. Landscape lights are prone to all kinds of potential damage from clumsy pedestrians to cumbersome lawn equipment like lawnmowers. Plowing over one of your tier lights with a lawn mower or chopping it off at the post with a weed-whacker may be inconvenient but, with a plastic kit, replacing that one light will cost you very little. Not so with a metal light you’ve flattened with your John Deer tractor.
Finally, you should keep in mind that plastic construction isn’t just some cheap and barely passable material. Your lights will be virtually indistinguishable from metal lights when they’re doing their job at night. The material is also surprisingly durable. It tolerates weathering well and stands up to wear and tear. It also won’t dent, which sounds minor, but if you could see the damage inflicted on my metal lights by rocks and debris thrown from lawn mowers, you’d understand the appeal.
I’m glad you’ve read this far. Hopefully you can appreciate the pros and cons to plastic landscape lighting kits. Their strengths are clearly in the savings department. Allowing your expectations aren’t overly ambitious, they really are the way to go if money is tight. Unless you intend to light up a drive way or paint sweeping swaths of light into your trees, you can get good results marking out a path and lighting some small features and plants at a fraction of the cost.
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