With Halloween around the corner, you are probably thinking of ways to decorate your house for a Halloween themed pool party. Besides the mandatory skeleton on a tube or the floating pumpkins, today we want to talk about an easy way to set the right mood with lighting.
In recent years, LED lights have increasingly dominated the lighting market and swimming pool lighting is not the exception. The smaller niche less lights are much brighter than halogen while utilizing less energy. But most important to homeowners is the variety of colors that can illuminate your pool with these new LED lights.
As reported by Aqua Magazine:
One of the hallmarks of LED technology is that it increases options for colored lighting, which paves the way for innovative design and that ever-desirable “wow factor”.
“When you look back to the time before LED lights came into the market, the only way to get color lighting into your pool was with halogen lights and color wheels or fiberoptic systems,” James Carter, lighting product manager for Hayward Industries says. “Oftentimes, the color you’d get would be a lighter color than what you would anticipate, based on the delivery method. As LEDs have become more efficient, more practical and brighter, you can now deliver an effect that you weren’t able to before with the previous technology. You can achieve saturated blues, reds and greens, a broad range of colors. It’s a unique ambiance that we’re not accustomed to seeing in typical swimming pools.”
Carter adds, however, that greater flexibility and power in colored lighting do present a challenge in terms of educating homeowners, who don’t always entirely understand the possibilities. “There can be some initial hesitation for some consumers because you say colored lighting and the first thing they think of are Christmas tree lights,” he says. “They don’t quite make the connection that it’s not lighting a Christmas tree, but more like lighting the Empire State Building, where it’s all lit up with this beautiful saturated color — that it brings this whole different effect to a backyard. The more people see it in their neighbors’ pools and their friends’ pools, the more likely they are to adopt it.”
LED’s ability to deliver a wider variety of colors at greater saturation has also impacted control technology. “All of our automation systems make it very easy to adjust the light color, and move from color show to color show to enhance and set different moods,” Zack Pickard, product manager for Pentair says. “For a Fourth of July barbecue, a few quick touches can turn a pool into a red, white and blue color show.”
Although the possibilities for colored lighting have dramatically increased, LEDs also enhance white lighting. “Now that color is available to everyone, there’s a move back to the white lighting, and even warm white light so that it matches the landscape lighting, where the landscape architects are trying to complement the green of the foliage. More and more architects are recommending that the pool lighting match that with an almost incandescent type of look,” Graham Orme, product manager for lighting and water features for Zodiac Pool Systems.
To give you an idea of how exceptional the new LED pool lights are, we had a client that after installing LED lights on their pool was concerned about how bright they were. We have become so accustomed to the dim lighting of halogen that it takes time to adapt to the wow effect LED lights have on a pool and in consequence the backyard.
Are you ready to be wowed? Give us a call or contact us here for a free estimate on how to upgrade your pool lights with led technology
