A beautifully landscaped garden is a treat for family and guests alike, but even more so when the escape can be carried past daylight hours and into the night. To get there requires the inclusion of landscape lighting in your garden design, a prospect once considered frustrating to implement and prohibitively expensive. The good news is that there is a convenient, easy-to-install and cost effective solution in the form of inexpensive landscape lighting kits. The bad news is that, if you don’t know their limitations, you could wind up very disappointed with your results.

Inexpensive landscape lighting kits manufactured by companies like Malibu seem like a great idea. It’s important that you know that there are limitations inherent in their plastic construction that put them at a disadvantage relative to their metal counterparts. Not knowing those limitations can lead to disappointment and we don’t want that so this article will help you understand the good, bad and ugly (not necessarily in that order) about plastic landscape lighting kits. Just be sure to read to the end before you make your decision.

The ugly is pretty straightforward. Plastic landscape lighting kits are relatively uninspired in their design compared to the myriad options available with metal lights. Now I don’t mean to say they’re truly ugly, just that mass production with an eye on keeping prices low means you aren’t going to get much in the way of variety, particularly if you consider the alternatives available with much more expensive metal lights.

Truly inexpensive landscape lighting kits will be made of plastic and will have what can best be described as a dime-a-dozen look. There won’t be any variety in your kit. All the lights will look the same excepting cases in which you buy a kit containing path and spot lights. In that case, all the path lights will look the same and all the spotlights will look the same. Of course, remember that you’re trying to save money here so variety and unique features are two of the sacrifices you’ll have to make.

As for the “bad” element, there really is only one you need be aware of and that’s brightness (or, more accurately, the lack thereof). The culprit here is the very material these lights are made of. Plastic, as you may have noticed, melts at much lower temperatures than metal. That lower melting point limits the wattage of bulbs that can be used in plastic landscape lighting kits. Higher wattage equates to greater heat. If you aspire to a brightly illuminated garden and want to paint sculpture with light then you’ll most likely have to shell out the extra coin for metal lights.

With the ugly and the bad out of the way, let’s cover the good and discuss why you might actually want to consider landscape lighting kits. The first plus, which we’ve already touched on, is price. But what exactly do we mean by inexpensive. Well, to put it into perspective, let’s use Malibu (mind you, there are other great kit manufacturers out there, I’m just using them for convenience) as an example. Malibu manufactures a 20 light plastic kit with power pack and cable included which retails for around $60USD. They also manufacture a metal kit with only 6 lights which retails for just shy of $120USD. So there’s your frame of reference; less than half the lights for around twice the price.

There’s another hidden benefit to plastic landscape lighting kits inherent in their plastic construction and that’s replacement costs. Landscape lights are prone to all kinds of potential damage from clumsy pedestrians to cumbersome lawn equipment like lawnmowers. Plowing over one of your tier lights with a lawn mower or chopping it off at the post with a weed-whacker may be inconvenient but, with a plastic kit, replacing that one light will cost you very little. Not so with a metal light you’ve flattened with your John Deer tractor.

Finally, you should keep in mind that plastic construction isn’t just some cheap and barely passable material. Your lights will be virtually indistinguishable from metal lights when they’re doing their job at night. The material is also surprisingly durable. It tolerates weathering well and stands up to wear and tear. It also won’t dent, which sounds minor, but if you could see the damage inflicted on my metal lights by rocks and debris thrown from lawn mowers, you’d understand the appeal.

I’m glad you’ve read this far. Hopefully you can appreciate the pros and cons to plastic landscape lighting kits. Their strengths are clearly in the savings department. Allowing your expectations aren’t overly ambitious, they really are the way to go if money is tight. Unless you intend to light up a drive way or paint sweeping swaths of light into your trees, you can get good results marking out a path and lighting some small features and plants at a fraction of the cost.