Deck Lighting in Kenwood, OH

A great many decks in Kenwood (ZIP 45236) have a roof or a screen room over part of them and open boards over the rest. In daylight that reads as one space. After dark it stops being one, and lighting is where it shows up first.

The difference is the ceiling. Under a roof there is a surface a few feet above your head and it sends light back down, so one warm fitting under there covers the whole covered area, because everything leaving it comes back off the ceiling and the walls. Out on the open boards there is nothing overhead at all. Light that goes up is gone, and the same fitting out there lights a circle around itself and stops.

So the two get different treatments off one transformer. Under the roof, one or two fittings on the beam or the rafter line, aimed down, on their own switch. Out on the open deck, the low work: risers, under-rail, post caps, several small sources. Both matched to the same warm color so it still reads as one deck, and the covered end is never the brighter of the two. A bright room with a dark deck past it is how everybody ends up back indoors.

Most of the screen rooms around here went on years after the deck did, so their ceilings are already closed. That is not an obstacle. On a finished ceiling the fittings surface mount to the beam or along the rafter line and the cable follows the same line, which on stained timber is close to invisible and takes an afternoon.