Prepairing Your Outdoor Stair Lighting

Your outdoor stair lighting serves three primary functions.

It keeps your outdoor traffic flowing, reduces the likelihood of tripping or falling, and lessens the chance you'll get sued due to a fall or an accident.

However, you will need to take some time out and prepare your stair lighting setup.

Anticipate Traffic Movement

Before you begin installing your stair lights, you will want to know exactly how and where your traffic will be moving throughout your outdoor space.

If there is an area you'd prefer traffic not to move, you may use dim lighting or no lighting at all so not to draw attention to that space.

You may also decide that outdoor path lighting is the easiest way to to help your traffic move smoothly throughout you landscape and towards your staircase.

Where To Install Your Outdoor Stair Lighting?

Typically when lighting a staircase your goal is not to provide light to each individual step, instead you'll want to light the whole staircase.

To do so, you'll want to light your stairs from up above. Therefore, you'll need to find an available spot where you can install your outdoor lighting fixtures.

Overhead Mounting Locations

Take a walk around your outdoor landscape and notice any possible overhead mounting locations. The point here is to find an overhead location close to your stairs where you could mount your lights.

Are there any trees by the staircase? If so, use outdoor tree lighting to downlight your staircase. If there is a wall adjacent to your stairs you could use outdoor wall lighting to light your staircase.

Lighting stairs From Above

Lighting your staircase from up above is effective when attempting to hide fixtures up in a tree or roof overhang.

The best approach to downlighting your steps is to center your fixture over the staircase. This will usually provide adequate lighting for all your steps and may even spread some light out onto your surrounding landscape.

If you can't quite position the fixtures directly center over your staircase, move them down the staircase. Doing so will allow you to illuminate the steps without casting a shadow on the stairs treads.

Alternative Mouting Locations

If you don't have any overhead locations nearby, you may want to look into installing decorative outdoor lighting poles to mount your light fixtures onto and downlight your staircase.

If installing outdoor lighting poles is out of the question and you're not able to find any overhead mounting locations, you may want to consider outdoor step lighting.

With outdoor step lighting you will not need an overhead mounting location but you can achieve nice results just the same.