Outdoor Lighting Perspectives of Pittsburgh's Blog

White LED decklights

outdoorlightingofpittsburgh — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 00:31:25 +0000

On Thursday, we did a custom LED deck light installation. We used our standard 3w LED deck light fixture, but instead of doing it in copper, we had the fixture powder coated white to try and get it to blend right in with the white railing around the deck.
It blended perfectly, and during the day when the light is off you can barely tell That is was there.

Mission accomplished, as you will see in the pictures the fixture is very inconspicuous and everything turned out great.

2011 Pittsburgh home and garden show

outdoorlightingofpittsburgh — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 18:27:26 +0000

Day 1 of the Pittsburgh home and garden show, our Booth is #1011 showing our LED outdoor lights. Stop by and check out our hone show specials!!!!!

Recap of led year 1

outdoorlightingofpittsburgh — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 12:12:09 +0000

As I am sitting in the hospital with my wife awaiting the birth of our third child, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to post a recap of my first year with LED landscape lights.

Overall I would say it was a great success, we did about 70% of our new installations in LED. This was about 40 or so installations, averaging 20 fixtures per installation. This also includes 2 jobs: one 65 lights, and The other 70 lights.

It still amazes me, how much light output we are able to achieve using such little wattage. The LED’s we used ranged in wattage from 1w to 9w, and the typical job of 20 loghts only consumed a maximum of 180 Watts. Most were less since we used a good amount of 3 Watt lights opposed to the 9w. These jobs in halogen would have been around 700w. That is a huge savings in energy consumption over time.

My crew absolutely loved working with the LED’s fixtures . Due to the low draw they made installations much easier, and we were able to use a lot less wire. There were a couple of driver issues on our premium LED outdoor lights, but this problem has since been fixed.

Our standard LED landscape lighting fixtures on the other hand had a 100% success rate, not have 1 problem. We are very impressed by this, and plan on pushing this product more this year, and making it our main offering. The new chip we will be using produces 100 more lumens and comes in a 40 degree beam spread which will make the effect even better.

New Look for Outdoor Lighting Perspectives of Pittsburgh

outdoorlightingofpittsburgh — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 02:43:39 +0000

Unfortunately a couple of weeks ago we had a little accident with our van, some ice, and a fire hydrant (no one was injured). The whole passenger side from the cargo doors back needed to be replaced. The good thing about it was that our insurance paid for us to replace the vehicle wrap that was destroyed in the accident.Click to view slideshow.

outdoorlightingofpittsburgh — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 03:00:27 +0000

All of the wow without all the work. via #constantcontact

outdoorlightingofpittsburgh — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 03:00:06 +0000

All of the wow without all the work. via #constantcontact.

New Outdoor Lighting Perspectives Website

outdoorlightingofpittsburgh — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 03:22:05 +0000

The Newest version of Outdoor Lighting Perspectives website had been launched. Now featuring LED landscape lighting, Commercial outdoor Lighting, and Holiday Lighting. www.outdoorlights.com

The new website goes much more in depth into LED landscape lighting which is something that we have been offering all year, and have used in 50% of this years jobs.

The franchise has also added a holiday decorating service as a service. We started our Christmas decorating service last year and are very happy that Holiday Lighting by Outdoor Lighting Perspectives has taken off. We hope all of our fellow franchisees have the same success that we had in our first year.

Holiday Lighting Design Options

outdoorlightingofpittsburgh — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 18:10:42 +0000

It is getting to be the end of the summer, and Holiday lighting season is right around the corner. We will work with you to design, install, remove, and store your holiday lighting. We use a revolutionary design software, that we can upload a picture of a home on, and place all of the lighting on it in the picture. We can place roof line lights (both C9 and Light links) wreathes, garland, lawn displays, starbursts, and we can even show tree and shrub wrapping.

The design software really helps everyone visualize what their lighting plan will look like almost exactly before there is any commitment to purchase.

Below is an example of a house that we designed with the software, and also a picture of how the actual home looked when installed. As you will see, it is a very close comparison between software and actual photo.

Design Software

Actual Photo of House

Unique LED landscape lighting installation

outdoorlightingofpittsburgh — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 02:23:28 +0000

Part of a large LED landscape lights job that we have been working on was installing up lights, and pathway lights that were recessed into a concrete sidewalk. In order to do this we had to get a 2″ pvc sleeve to hold the place when the concrete was poured for our fixture. Then we took a piece of 1/2″ pvc conduit and drilled it through all the fixtures and ran it the length of the run with a piece sticking out the end of the sidewalk for us to run the wire.

After the sidewalk was poured we had to cut the pieces of 2″ conduit to make it flush to ground. After we had them flush to the ground we drilled out the 1/2″ conduit that was on the inside of the 2″ pieces. Once we had the holes done, we fished our fishing snake through the 1/2″ conduit until it came out at the end of the last of the 2″ pieces. We connected our wire to it and pulled it back through the 1/2″ conduit until the wire was all the way through. We then Pulled it up and it was ready for the fixtures to be hooked up. We used our typical 12 gauge wire which was really tight pulling through the 1/2″ pipe. For the next set of 3 we have to do, we will definitely be using 16 or 18 gauge wire so we have more room and it will be easier for the pull. Below are a couple picture of us snaking and pulling the wire through.

We also did lights on the second flood balcony/bay window and the 3rd floor. For these lights, we ran the wires up behind the downspouts, and attached the fixtures directly to the roof to shine up on the 2nd and 3rd floor facade.

Before after pictures are below:

First LED Installation

outdoorlightingofpittsburgh — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 03:18:27 +0000

Here are some pictures from our first LED landscape lighting installation. Still working on getting the night time pictures. As you will see out LED fixtures are extremely compact, and not blend into the the landscape very well. It is amazing how much easier the installation is:

1. We used 25% of the wire that we would have used if it were a halogen installation.

2. We were able to reuse the customers existing malibu 12V transformer (which we all know is not a quality unit)

3. We put 22 lights on a 300watt transformer and still had plenty of room left for more.

4. We didn’t have to spend time measuring voltage to fixtures, since LED lights do not have any voltage drop.

Hopefully I will be able to get out and night and take some follow up night time pict

ures