The extensive and innovative outdoor lighting range at Fantasy Lights includes anti- corrosion lighting for salt air areas, copper/solid brass lighting and marine grade stainless lighting. A five-year warranty, available to members of the trade, underlines the quality and durability of the firm’s products.
As well as supplying only the highest-grade lighting products to the industry, the team at Fantasy Lights is also on hand to offer advice when it comes to selecting the right products for the job and for planning a garden lighting system. According to the company, the latter is all about understanding and using lighting ideas and effects in the garden. Good garden lighting depends upon correct positioning of garden lights and selecting the correct lamp type, wattage and coverage or beam angle.
The next step is to choose the garden lights that will house the lamps in the right way to do their job properly and reliably. Unless they have been chosen specifically to make a design statement, outdoor lights should be hidden or camouflaged wherever possible. The Fantasy Lights’ team is also on hand to advise on IP ratings. An Ingress Protection rating is given to a garden lighting product to show its resistance to entry by physical objects and particles in the atmosphere and its resistance to water entering the enclosure or housing. It consists of two digits after the capital letters ‘IP’.
The first digit relates to resistance to foreign bodies down to 1mm2 – this is the minimum for an exterior fitting in order to keep insects out of the areas where live parts are located. The second digit measures protection against liquids. In practice this means that lights are weatherproof enough for outdoor use with a minimum rating of 4. Ratings of 5 and 6 means they are ok in areas where you are using a hosepipe.
A 7 rating is where lights start to become more than weatherproof – they can be regarded as waterproof for limited immersion in water. The 8 rating means the light is waterproof for use in ponds, bog gardens or riverside gardens prone to flooding.
Uplighting of trees is another area of expertise at Fantasy Lights. Metal halide uplights can be used with a 36° beam to penetrate up through the branch structure while 60° beams may be used for wider, spreading trees. Recessed uplights require a position above the water table with 300mm of shingle drainage below the fitting; spike mount uplights can be used in the ground subject to water-logging. If the diameter of the canopy exceeds 10m, two or more uplights can be used for a fuller effect.
Fantasy Lights recommends the 60° beam angle options in the Apollo spike mount uplight and Persius/Olympus recessed uplight ranges. Where the outer canopy of a large tree is dense, the trunk and centre of the branch structure can be uplighted with a 36° beam uplight, with one or more wide beam 60° metal halide floodlights used to illuminate the outer canopy.
Fantasy Lights, Mulcahy Keane Estate, Greenhills Rd, Walkinstown, Dublin 12
T: 00353 ((0)1 4601052
E: sales@fantasylights.com
W: www.fantasylights.com
