Landscape Lighting in Collingwood
Collingwood properties earn their lighting twice: on summer evenings when the garden is the extra room, and on winter nights when you arrive after dark to a house that has been empty all week.
Lighting for a house that is not always occupied
A good share of the houses up here are weekend and seasonal properties. For those, the lighting has to run itself: a photocell or timer brings it on at dusk whether anyone is home or not, so you arrive to a lit entrance instead of a black driveway, and the house does not spend five nights a week looking empty.
That is also the argument for doing it properly rather than with solar stakes from the hardware store. A low-voltage system on a transformer runs reliably through the seasons and is serviceable when something fails. The detail of how these systems work is on the main landscape lighting page.
Restraint is the design
The eye reads contrast. A mature tree uplit from the base, a stone face grazed from close in, a path marked just enough to walk safely, and dark space left between them: that is what makes a garden read at night. A fixture every two metres reads as a runway. Fixtures are aimed after dark, on site, with you there if you want to be, because that is the only way to judge it.
One set of trenches, not two
Lighting cable and irrigation lines run through the same ground at similar depths. On a property getting both, doing them in one pass means one set of cuts in the lawn, and each run placed knowing where the other is. FlowCon does both, which is rarer than it should be, and installing the sprinklers in Collingwood has its own page. The rest of what we do in town is on the Collingwood page.
Repairs to lighting that came with the house
Plenty of Collingwood gardens have a system someone installed years ago: half the fixtures out, connections corroded, a transformer of unknown health. Those usually come back without being replaced wholesale. Corroded connections, cut cable and dead fixtures are all findable and fixable, and the first visit establishes what is actually wrong before anything is quoted.
Landscape Lighting in Collingwood, asked and answered
Are the lights LED?
Modern low-voltage landscape fixtures are LED, which is why a full garden of them draws less power than a couple of old halogen floods. Older halogen systems can usually be converted fixture by fixture rather than rebuilt.
Can the lighting run while the house is empty?
Yes, and on a weekend property it should. A photocell or timer brings the system on at dusk and off on schedule with nobody home. It gets set once, to suit how the property is used.
Does winter damage landscape lighting?
The cable is buried and the fixtures are built for outdoors, so the system itself winters fine. The usual casualties are fixtures clipped by snow clearing, which is a reason to place them out of the plough line in the first place, and one more argument for a spring walk-through.
Can you add to the lighting I already have?
Often yes, if the transformer has capacity and the existing cable is sound. That gets checked first, because adding fixtures to an overloaded run makes every light on it dimmer.
Do you also light backyards, or just the front?
Both. Fronts are usually about the entrance and arrival; backyards are about the sitting areas, the planting and the trees, which is where restraint and aiming matter most. The photos on this site are all real FlowCon installs.