Late at night you’re driving down a dark, deserted suburban avenue and trying not to think about the Stephen King novel you re-read last week. Suddenly, in the corner of your eye, something catches your attention. You turn and scream at the balls of faint blue light hovering like tiny sad ghosts in the yard next to your car.
Relieved but embarrassed, you drive on.
Why do LED landscape lights have to be so bad?
That’s the problem with the solar LED landscape lights sold at the big box stores. They put out almost no light, and what light they do emit is a sickly blue glow. The reason solar lights look so bad is that they’re just not putting out enough juice to cast reasonable light, and they’re using cheap LEDs. Unfortunately this leads to a lot of homeowners assuming that all LED landscape lights are cold and blue-hued.
Color Temperatures and LED Landscape Lights
Luckily, there is an objective way to know how warm or cool the color of your LED landscape lights will be. Westinghouse explains it on their website thusly:
The color temperature of a light source is the temperature of an ideal black-body radiator that radiates light of comparable hue to that light source. The temperature is conventionally stated in units of absolute temperature, known as Kelvin (K).
Simply put, we can determine what the light output will look like by looking at the stated Kelvins on the packaging. Lower numbers (generally less than 3000 Kelvin) will produce very warm hues. Higher numbers become more of a pure white, becoming more blue at the far end of the spectrum. This chart sums it up well:
The bottom line is that there’s no need to fear LED landscape lights! The energy savings over halogen is amazing, and that lower power consumption also means an LED system is more flexible when it comes to installation. Lower lifetime cost + the same warm-hued light you love = a win all around. Need help with your landscape lighting project? Contact us today!
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