Safety Lighting And Outdoor Stairways

 

In our previous articles we introduced you to some of the benefits of outdoor landscape lighting and, in the following article, I shall focus on a very important aspect of your garden - safety, and in particular, outdoor stairway lighting.

The house in which I currently live is built on high foundations which means that I have stairways front and back. This is the first time I have lived in such a property and I found myself facing a few problems, firstly I have, this year, planted some clematis to, hopefully, grow up the stairway but I am also having to consider safety aspects such as hand rails and outdoor stairway lighting.

When I was first considering the problem of my front steps I simply placed one outdoor light above my door. While this was sufficient for the immediate vicinity of the doorway I could not avoid dangerous shadows and dark areas. Another problem I noticed, almost immediately, was that when people left my house the moved from a brightly lit area to a dark area and this created the strange, and highly dangerous, effect of rendering them almost blind. Obviously, on a stairway or steps, this is incredibly dangerous and could easily lead to harm.

Avoiding Danger

The only way to solve my outdoor stairway lighting problems was to approach the topic from two directions. Firstly I needed to light the areas in shadow but also reduce the lighting gradually until it reached the end of my front yard.

Lighting the shaded areas of my steps was easy and all I needed to do was place a couple of spotlights/floodlights angled to point in the desired direction. I was able to fix these to my house but if you are not able to do this you could attach them to a pole or post. Power wise I simply drilled through my wall and fed the power cable into the house.

It was slightly more problematic dealing with the weird effect of becoming blind when moving from light to dark. In the end I opted for some rather cheap low voltage outdoor stairway lighting which could be inset into the first few steps and along my pathway (at the edges). I was able to inset these rather easily into my pathway as I ran the cable alongside the edge but the steps proved something of a problem as I had a solid concrete stairway and I had not considered how to run the cable to each light. Needless to say I quickly abandoned that not so bright idea and settled for another spotlight instead.

The thing to remember when lighting an outdoor stairway is that you really must test it yourself when it is darkest outside. Otherwise you might end up missing the obvious, or maybe the not so obvious but highly dangerous. If I had not tested my own outdoor stairway lighting I would have been totally unaware that my visitors were blinded as they moved into the dark areas. Even though it was only for a few seconds they could have easily stumbled and hurt themselves.

 

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