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As you conduct your fall maintenance tasks in your yard and garden, you should also start planning for changes in your approach to outdoor lighting for winter. An important consideration for winter lighting upgrades is safety, especially in snowy and icy conditions and with more hours of darkness. While outdoor lighting during the other three seasons can be more for the aesthetic, minimizing trip and slip hazards, as well as increasing overall visibility, is of greater concern in the winter. Here’s how to optimize your outdoor lighting for winter.
Basic fall maintenance tasks for outdoor lighting
Before winter hits, you should do some basic maintenance on your outdoor light fixtures so they are safe and visible:
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Clean fixture lenses and wipe off dirt and debris with soap and water.
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Check outdoor cables for exposed wires, and wrap connectors with fresh electrical tape.
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Keep up with leaf removal and yard debris removal to prevent fixture damage or corrosion.
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Trim back plants and hedges that have grown over outdoor lights.
Test and swap out bulbs
Do a walk-through of your yard with the lights on to find burned-out bulbs, and replace those that are dead. Depending on the type of bulbs you currently have, you may consider upgrading to LED lights, which are durable and long-lasting, or swapping for brighter alternatives (at least 300 lumens) for paths and high-traffic areas.
If you live in an area that gets a lot of snow during the winter, you should also check the IP rating—a measure of how well a fixture holds up against dirt and moisture—on your outdoor lights. A fixture with an at least an IP65 rating is water resistant and weatherproof, but you may want to look for IP68 for the most extreme weather conditions.
In your walk-through, note any corners of your driveway, entryways, or yard that may need more illumination as the sun sets earlier and darkness lasts longer. You can either adjust the angle of your current fixtures to improve coverage or add additional lights as needed.
Update timers
With shorter days and longer nights, you may need to adjust timers for your outdoor fixtures and smart bulbs. This is especially important for security lights that illuminate paths or provide coverage of your property. You should also test motion sensor settings on any fixtures with that feature, noting light sensitivity (and whether it is falsely triggered by elements like wind and rain) and how long the bulb stays on after activation. Many motion-sensing lights, like the AloftSun Solar pathway lights and the Leonite LED security light, have multiple adjustable modes.
Adjust color temperatures
Different color temperatures (measured in kelvin) are recommended for different outdoor lighting purposes: very cool lights at 4600K-6500K are typically used for security lights, while very warm white lights at 2200K provide a gentler, candlelight aesthetic. While you should keep high-kelvin bulbs in your security lights, consider swapping to low-kelvin bulbs for other fixtures to soften the contrast against snow and ice.
Select a winter aesthetic
Of course, a change in season may also call for a change in lighting aesthetic, whether that’s the addition of colored holiday lights or switching your bulbs to twinkle mode (which adds interest to an otherwise bleak outdoor landscape and also requires less energy). We recommend the Nanoleaf smart outdoor string lights and the Govee permanent outdoor lights.
If you have uplighting on your trees, consider changing the angle to illuminate the branches rather than the trunks, which can look softer and more visually interesting.
Clean regularly
As winter condition roll in, be sure to keep up with the clearing, cleaning, and maintenance of your light fixtures. Snow and debris accumulation can reduce visibility and eventually damage the fixtures.
