Exterior Holiday Landscape Lighting in Salt Lake City

Looking for beautiful outdoor lights in the Salt Lake City area? You’re in the right place—and not just because Salt Lake City has some of the best Christmas light displays around. In addition to going over some of the local light displays, this article will discuss some of the great lighting solutions for homeowners in the Salt Lake City area.

What’s great about Christmas lights in Utah?

You might have heard of Utah’s tourist slogan about having “the greatest snow on earth”—and that may well be true, especially when it comes to skiing, snowboarding, and other winter sports in the state. But there’s another winter-themed aspect to Utah that should probably get just as much acclaim: the Christmas lights.

The holiday season in Utah tends to be a bright and colorful one, quite literally. The tradition of beautiful light displays in the area, especially in the Salt Lake City area (including nearby Park City and other areas along the Wasatch Front), has inspired many homeowners to contribute to the festivities with their own Christmas light displays. Permanent outdoor lighting systems are more and more popular in the area, allowing homeowners to express their holiday spirit however they want (even beyond the Christmas season).

The high demand for Christmas lights and other exterior lighting systems in the Utah area has resulted in the presence of many professional lighting companies; these companies typically offer not only holiday lighting but also landscaping and other forms of exterior lighting. Having options is good, but where should homeowners go when they’re looking for lighting solutions for their property and landscaping?

Christmas Lights in Salt Lake City

Let’s size up the area first. What are the big Christmas light displays and events in the Salt Lake City area, and how can they inspire your own home lighting ideas?

First, let’s look at the lights on Temple Square. Temple Square is the name given to the pedestrian walking area near the Salt Lake City temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Covering several blocks worth of land, Temple Square is famous for the extensive displays of thousands of Christmas lights which are set up there for the Christmas Season, a tradition since 1965. Visitors can walk along tree-lined paths where the Christmas lights quite literally surround them—on branches overhead, on bushes and lampposts to the sides, and even as displays on some of the structures in the area. If you’re looking for an impressive, huge display of Christmas lights and Christmas spirit in the Salt Lake Valley, Temple Square is impossible to beat.

But of course, Salt Lake isn’t the only city in Utah, and it’s not the only place with impressive light displays around Christmastime. The Ashton Gardens at Thanksgiving Point (in Lehi, Utah) put on the Luminaria event for the season, offering a dazzling display of holiday cheer and festivities with both static and programmable, animated lights adorning the massive garden’s trees, walkways, and hills. This is another walk-through event that offers a wide variety of sights and holiday food and gifts.

Aside from these light-themed events and displays, Salt Lake City has many other Christmas events. One that you might know about is The Christmas Market. Patterned after traditional German Weihnachtsmärkte, or Christmas Markets, the Christkindlmarkt in Salt Lake City is one of the area’s unique Christmas events. Visitors to the market will find a variety of Christmas- and winter-themed vendor booths, including some with a traditional German angle on the holiday and others that are uniquely local. In fact, the market is a great place to find and support small local businesses that will sell their products at the booths. There’s always food and drink to be had there, as well as frequent live music performances and other presentations, and—most relevantly for our discussion here—amazing Christmas decorations and light displays.

Now that you’ve had a chance to look at some of the local inspiration for Christmas lights and festivities, let’s get into the details about how to find good outdoor lighting fixtures for your home and property.

What is the average cost of LED lights?

Outdoor Christmas lights are just one of the many kinds of LED outdoor lights—whether it’s decorative, functional, or something in between, there are many different kinds of lighting you could consider for your property. When you’re looking at decorative outdoor lighting, the kind that is permanently installed on a house or in a yard, the lighting system will typically cost somewhere around $500. (Of course, the non-permanent variety are much cheaper, but are also often not intended for extended use.) For LED landscaping lights, which highlight key features of your exterior property or provide additional security, prices range from around $2000 to $5000 for most homes.

In both cases, the price will vary heavily depending on the size of the home or landscape that is being lit, and on how you want the system to be set up. A simpler system on a smaller property will cost less, of course.

What does installation cost?

There’s one more price factor to consider with landscape lighting: the installation costs. The installation of outdoor lights, especially permanent decorative lights for a home’s exterior, can run from around a couple of hundred dollars to a couple thousand, depending on the size of the home or landscape. This gets you the benefit of having everything taken care of by professionals so that you don’t have to worry about the details of the installation process, but it does obviously require some investment.

Of course, you may have the electrical know-how to get these systems working yourself, and just about anyone can install some simpler kinds of exterior lighting as a DIY project. But if you’re not sure about your own experience in this area, landscape lighting installation might be better left to the professionals.

What’s the cheapest form of landscape lighting?

Let’s look at one case where these kinds of outdoor lighting can be very cheap.

Landscape or yard lighting is one of those things that can be almost anything you want it to be, depending on what your property looks like, what kind of effects you’re looking for…and, of course, how much you’re looking to spend.

Wired landscape lighting can be quite expensive if you want thorough coverage of your property, but it doesn’t always have to break the bank. On the other hand, a solar-powered, individual lighting fixture will likely be one of the simplest and cheapest forms of landscape lighting. You can buy small lights which are installed with a simple stake in the ground and which will power themselves through small solar panels without any outside intervention or need to switch out batteries.

These are almost always going to be the cheapest landscaping lights, especially for a smaller outdoor space, like an area that might need path lights; the biggest money saver here is the fact that pretty much anyone can set up these lights without needing a professional team to install them, and without having to mess with electrical wiring.

These cheap, individual landscaping lights do have their own issues, however. The biggest one is that cheap lights are, well, cheap. You get what you pay for, in other words, and these inexpensive and simple lights, while they can nicely accent a landscape, are not going to be the most enduring or sturdy options. If you’ve ever bought a few flashlights over the years, you know what this is like: the cheaper options are usually going to work fine for a while, but they can break easily.

Of course, these cheaper lighting options can also be easily replaced one by one if they’re broken or somehow stop working properly, but having to do this may be a dealbreaker for those looking for a longer-term solution for their landscape lighting.

No matter what types of lights you’re looking for, low-voltage landscape lighting is often an excellent option (for many reasons, price included). Low-voltage lighting is usually easier and safer to operate and install because there is a lower amount of power required to light an LED bulb and, therefore, to run the LED lighting systems.

Which company is best for lights?

JellyFish Lighting is a Utah local headquartered in the Silicon Slopes area, and they have a great understanding of what people in the area are looking for when it comes to outside lighting. We offer permanent outdoor lighting for homes and businesses, with the option for downward- or outward-facing setups and programmable options so that users can get their lighting systems looking exactly how they want them whenever they need to make changes. They offer many different colors that can be selected, including a wide variety of white lighting that can match any exterior look for your home, yard, or commercial property, and it’s all dimmable as well so that you can control color, pattern, and brightness all together. The lights are low voltage (using less than one watt at full brightness) and, therefore, easy for homeowners to replace themselves if they don’t want to pay to call out the professionals to take care of things. The system can be used to light up certain areas of a home, the entire front of a business, or just specific areas of interest, depending on what you’re looking for on any given day.

If you’re curious about how JellyFish Lighting can help you with your home’s landscape lighting, reach out to them today for an estimate for your property’s needs.