If you have a water feature, we assume the most important reason you want it is for aesthetic appeal, and adding lights to it can improve the aesthetic appeal at night. Accenting pond lights can be enchanting during the evening and night, even mesmerizing. Perhaps you wish to illuminate a pond fountain, a concrete or resin fountain, a stream or a waterfall or a combination of water features. Lighting can enhance not only the water features, but the flora surrounding it, as well as boulders and pebbles.
Where to Place the Lights
You want to hide the actual fixtures as much as you can, whether the pond lighting parts be placed among boulders, beneath a waterfall, from the sides of fountains, or underwater. You can always add some rocks around the fixtures to hide them. Cable will need to go from the fixtures to the transformer or outlet, so you need to figure out how best to hide it, too.
You don’t usually want to shine directly onto the main feature of the fountain but to point the lights from the side. The trick to good lighting is accentuating the feature, not dominating it.
Where to Place the Transformer
The transformer needs to be plugged into an outlet, so that will limit where you can place it. Even so, try to hide the transformer as best you can, but keep in mind that some of these get hot and could start a fire in plants if not careful. Hiding behind rocks is the safer way to go in case your transformer should someday overheat.
Above Water and Underwater Lighting
Lights for ponds placed outside the feature can greatly enhance the water feature and can be angled up or down or from the side, depending on the desired effect. We have tested plenty of underwater lights for ponds, and at this point we would like to warn you: many of the fixtures leak and the lights stop working. LED lights burn cooler than halogens and don’t usually present as big of a leakage problem (as the seals in the fixtures often hold up better), but we have tested many underwater lights, including LED, that don’t last long due to leakage.
You can find quite a few on sale online just by typing in fountain lights or pond fountain lights in the search bar, but it is a good idea to read reviews and get a good idea of whether customers have had troubles with leakage. We have found many small pond lights for sale on the internet for between twenty and forty dollars. These light sets can be bought a fixture at a time or often you will find it better to purchase a whole set at once. Typically, the sets are “daisy chained” together, and include several feet of cable to each fixture, with one extra-long cable to the transformer. Many are sold with remote controls, which sometimes offer only an off/off option, but in many cases can control the color of LED lights and even the sequencing of colors in a synchronized fashion.
Light Kits for Large Pond Fountains
Customers who have large pond fountains for ponds from one-quarter of an acre to very large (five acres), often add lights to their fountains to illuminate and highlight them at night. Some have directional control and allow you to angle the light toward particular patterns of the fountain. Others use the directional aim already included in the LEDs (you see, with LEDs a manufacturer can order them with a 30-degree focus, 45-degree, etc. Fountain Mountain offers a blue LED light kit using 12 volts, with three fixtures for only $175 with free shipping. We offer a white LED kit using a 24-volt transformer for extra luminosity for only $235, and a color-changing LED kit using a 24-volt transformer for only $250. All of these units include brackets and stainless steel mounting screws for attaching to the float, three stainless steel fixtures, with 6 one-watt LED lights per fixture. Shipping is free. The brackets for all of these kits are intended for use with Fountain Tech floats.
We also offer an LED light kit with remote that allows changing color or pick a color (using your color wheel remote control). These are available in either 3-watt per fixture or 9-watt per fixture sets. The fixtures are made of bronze, and brackets can fit a number of different fountain floats. There is a photocell included so that lights come on at dark and turn off automatically at dawn.
In addition, we also offer fountain light kits from Kasco Marine and Scott Aerator companies. Kasco LED kits come in either composite or stainless steel housings, offer one color or multiple color remote control kits in 24-volt or 120-volt packages. These are intended for use with Kasco floats or, for the Kasco universal kits, they fit just about any kind of float manufactured.
Scott Aerator light kits offer 12v and 110-volt systems with or without remote control.