The so-called “Landscape Lighting” requires that the lighting should coordinate perfectly with the landscape as well as architectural features to achieve artistic effects. As one of the high-tech products which have the largest development prospects, the LED strip lighting has been widely adopted for three-dimensional lighting which outlines the rough sketch of buildings. It is predicted that the LED product will become the mainstream in landscaping lighting projects in 21st century with the vigorous promotion by the government. Among various liner LED lighting fixtures, the luminous efficiency of the LED strip lighting enables it to directly replace traditional neon lights and fluorescent lamps. It has great weather fastness, fairly low lumens depreciation, various colors, and changing lighting effects, so it could be widely applied in the contour lighting of urban architectures and have earned a good reputation among lighting designers and businesses. Cooperating with the microprocessor, the LED light sources take advantage of the principle of three primary colors and change flexibly according to different models, such as the ripple model, continuous color changing, timing color changing, gradual changes, and transients. Thus the amazing and diverse night scenes are created in the city.
The LED strip lighting no only keeps the original characteristics of LED products such as low power consumption, high brightness, and small volume, but also has many unique advantages, which determines that it is the ideal lighting fixture for landscape lighting. There is no doubt that it is the proud of the green lighting industry.
1. Energy conservation and environmental protection: this is a life style advocated all over the world. The LED strip lighting fairly corresponds to this idea: it has high luminous efficiency and low power consumption. It could change most of the electric energy into luminous energy. With the same lighting effect, the product could save more than 80% energy, and the lifespan is more than 10 times than that of traditional light sources, but the electric charge is about 90% lower. This is very important for China, the energy sources of which are quite strained. At the same time, the LED strip lighting is environmental friendly. It does not produce any ultraviolet or infrared rays, heat, radiation, and flares during working. The waste could be recycled. It does not contain toxic materials like mercury which may cause pollutions. All in all, the LED strip lighting is a typical green light source.
2. Long lifespan. Generally speaking, the LED strip lighting could work for about 5-10 years, which is more than 10 times that of traditional light sources. This is very important for landscape lighting, because the lights need not to be replaced frequently and the labor cost as well as maintenance cost could be greatly reduced.
3. Pure colors: the semiconductor P-N junction could produce lights of any colors, and the color is always pure and thick. Unlike incandescent lamps which have full spectrum, typical LEDs are of narrow spectrum range. So LEDs could be combined together arbitrarily and are very suitable for decoration lighting.
4. Safe and reliable: the working voltage of the LED strip lighting is around 1.5V-5V, and the working current is 20-70mA. There is no high voltage exist in the circuit, so it is safe for old people or children. As a cold light source, the product produce little heat and radiation during normal working, so it could be safely touched. Generally we adopted epoxy resin for sealing, and the solid-state light source has a great advantage: it does not contain any gas or glass shell, so there is no gas sealing problems and the anti-shock performance is excellent. Thus it could not be easily broken. The LED strip lighting could be used even under water and achieve the perfect combination of light and art. In addition, the controllability of the strip is good: the response time is short; it could be switched on and off frequently without damaging its performance.
5. Convenient application: the LED strip lighting is of light weight and small volume, so it could combine with the environment closely. Even in daytime, it will not damage the overall image of buildings. At the same time, the strip is fairly flexible. The LED light source is delicate, so it could adapt to different places of various appearances and sizes, such as dots, lines, faces, balls, and arbitrary artistic designs.
6. Easy control. The LED strip lighting belongs to low-voltage microelectronic products, which combine successfully the computer technology, network communication technology, image processing technology, and embedded control technology, so it is changeable and flexible. The intelligent control technology of LED landscape lighting could achieve various dynamic changing effects, which has excellent characteristics like high reliability, low price, and various control modes based on specific environments.
In summary, above advantages of the LED strip lighting make it the most popular product for landscape lighting. In practice, it has four development directions: first, it could upgrade common landscape lamps such as gardening lights, buried lights, lawn lamps, and wall lamps. Simply speaking, we replace traditional light sources by LEDs and achieve better illuminating effects. Cooperating with intelligent control, we could improve the overall artistic level. Second, develop non-standard or alien landscape lights. The lighting fixtures should combine with the environment and landscape perfectly. It needs to look beautiful in the daytime and bright in the night. As the LED strip lighting is flexible, it could be applied to make non-standard lights which coordinate with the environment very well. Third, develop artistic landscape lights: the LED light source provides large space for creativity. As the LED strip lighting has good controllability and rich colors, cooperating with the control technology we could design colorful, dynamic, and smooth lights. Four, develop light sculptures: we could develop a series of light sculptures which could catch people’s attention based on LED technology and microelectronic control technology. In short, the LED strip lighting has unique advantages for landscape lighting. We could believe that the LED landscape lights will develop for more artificial, intelligent, and flexible application. It will offer abundant business opportunities in the near future.
