The Best Pool Lights To Keep Your Kids Safe When Swimming At Night

You know
how your kids are – they like to play outside in the evening.
Whether it’s playing hide and seek with the kids in the
neighborhood, or shooting baskets at the net attached to the garage,
they like to be outside. You are about to build a new home with a
swimming pool, and you know it will have to
be well lit, so the kids can swim after dark. What type of lights
are best?

According
to Backyard
Living, there are a number of factors which will determine the
best lights for your pool:

Look at
the pool itself.
The configuration of the pool will determine how many lights are
needed to provide adequate illumination. A rectangular pool will use
fewer lights, and a pool with more curves will require more lights to
cover the area. Also, take a look at the interior color of the pool
you plan to build. A white plaster pool will require less
illumination than a pool with darker colored walls.

What
kind of lights?
The incandescent light has been used in pools for years, but a newer
option is to use LED lighting. A big factor in deciding to use LED is
cost – while these type of lights last longer, they are also
substantially more expensive than traditional lighting. An additional
option is colored lights. It is suggested that the owner check out
how those colored lights work with the pool design they have chosen.
It might be that with dark colored walls, if the owner chooses blue
lights, the illumination ability is greatly reduced. Make sure the
lights will brighten the pool enough to be able to clearly watch the
kids.

How many
lights?
This question depends on the combination of the configuration and
interior of the pool mentioned earlier. If the pool is rectangular
with white plaster walls, it will require fewer lights. It might be
that a pool with a lot of curves, and dark interior walls might not
be best suited to illuminate the pool for children to use at night. A
big question in determining this – do you think you’ll be able to
see the kids, especially when they duck underwater?

Think
about the yard area.
The pool owner might want to supplement the lights in the pool with
landscape lights for the yard. You don’t want the kids to get out
of the pool and be stumbling around in the dark stubbing toes, so a
bright back yard will add to the ability to keep the kids safe at
night. Bright patio lights will provide additional lighting for the
area. The kids will likely get out of the pool and go out into the
back yard, just like they would in daytime, so it might be helpful to
put lights in the trees and around the back yard, to make sure the
whole area is well lit.

Preferable
choices for kids.
For the pool owner who wants an exotic pool area, and will be
entertaining adults, having a pool with dark interior walls, lit by a
display of colored lights, might be a good choice. But for the pool
that will mainly be occupied by your kids and their friends, it might
be wiser to choose a pool that has white interior walls, is
rectangular, and has a lot of lights. Those lights can be either
incandescent or LED, depending on the budget. The use of dimmers can
mute the lighting when it’s not in use, but allows the ability to
turn the lights up brighter when the kids are swimming.

When Mom is
watching the kids swim at night, she will smile and relax,
comfortable that she can clearly see what’s going on.

While
Patricia
Hogenes works part time as an apartment leasing agent, her real loves
are her 3 kids, and having fun at the family pool. She has been
writing freelance articles 10 years, on topics as varied as law and
legal matters, adolescent drug treatment, and health topics such as
diabetes. She currently writes for Poolproducts.com.