Your garden lights are all wet! Lighting your swimming pool.

Howdy and welcome to article number six in our series on outdoor garden lighting. Today we’ll talk a little bit about lighting up your water features and your swimming pool.

It makes sense that these need to be lit properly in order to provide your guests with clear direction about where they can and cannot step, to prevent falls and unwanted splashing about in your goldfish pond. There are some special considerations that come into play when electrical lighting and water meet in your nighttime garden.

There is no doubt that your koi pond, swimming pool, or fountain looks great when lit from under the water but there are couple of things that you want to take into consideration before you go that route. You be wasting your time if your water feature whether natural or manufactured will not have consistently clear water. Why spend the time and the money and put up with the safety considerations involved in underwater lighting if you are not going to be able to see it anyway? If your water is already cloudy, it is going to look worse when you light it up from inside. All the mud, moss and tadpole poop in the water is going to act as a reflecting surface.

Hide the light source!

The other thing that you have to keep in mind is that it will not look good if we can see the light bulb. When lighting the water feature, the light source has to be hidden.

The easiest time to do this, whether it's for a man-made structure, a fountain, a quarry pond or a swimming pool is when the feature itself is being installed. Swimming pools especially present an expensive problem when retrofitting underwater lighting. In fact, if your pool is already in the ground I suggest that you purchase portable underwater fixtures instead of cracking any concrete.

Garden Lights for the Pool

If you are going to install lights in a swimming pool or if you are currently planning your pool and want to include lighting remember that the lights should be on the side of the pool from which the pool is most often viewed. In other words, if you step out onto your patio and look out into your backyard at your pool, you should install the lights on the side of the pool closest to your patio. This is to prevent the lights from glaring into your eyes while you are trying to enjoy your pool.

You will also want to be certain to install a dimming circuit and if your pool is uncovered at night, I highly recommend hooking the pool lights into a motion detecting circuit as well. If you often have houseguests, they will thank you for the means by which to avoid an unwanted bath.

What you need to remember when considering using submerged lighting is that any body of water in your garden, regardless of how large or small can be used as a mirror. Please keep this in mind when planning the installation of any kind of water feature. What else is in the garden near the spot? You may actually realize that you need to add a new, tall planting next year feature to take advantage of its reflective surface. Concerning lighting, you can emphasize this effect by not submerging your light source.

Instead, place a light source on the opposite side of the point from which the feature would normally be viewed. What you will see is that you created a beautiful top lit reflection of the area around your feature while the unlit water surface appears even darker than it otherwise would have. This technique is especially effective when used in combination with up lighting of a large statue or planting.

This is the end of article 6 in our apparently never-ending series of garden lighting articles. Next time, we will be talking about the proper way to plan your garden lighting system. See you then.