Deck Lighting in Clifton, OH

Most decks get thought about as daylight objects, and the lighting gets treated as something added on top for the evenings. On the households in Clifton (ZIP 45220) where both people work, that has it backwards for a good part of the year.

Count the weekdays between October and March. Somebody leaves before the light is worth anything and comes back after it has gone, which means that from Monday to Friday the deck they actually see is the lit one. The unlit version exists at the weekend and in the summer. For five days a week across six months, whatever the fittings do is the whole appearance of the back of the house.

That changes what is worth spending on. A scheme that only reads as a few pretty points of light is fine as an accent to a deck somebody is standing on. It is thin as the only view of a deck seen through a kitchen window at seven in the evening in January. So these get designed to give the space depth from indoors: the far corner lit so the eye travels, the guard line marked so the shape reads, and something at the boundary so the deck does not end in a black wall three feet past the glass.

It also changes the switching. Nobody is home to turn anything on at dusk, so a photocell does it and the deck is already lit when somebody walks in. An override by the door covers the evenings people are out there, and the schedule holds through the change of clocks without anybody adjusting it.