Lights.com—Discount Outdoor Lighting
The depth of a discount you can receive on outdoor lighting depends mostly on the flexibility of your requirements. Discount shopping requires an openness to alternative solutions and a lighting design that is somewhat open to improvisation. This does not mean that your final results will therefore seem haphazard or chaotic, it just means your plan may change significantly by the end. Start with several planned goals, but leave the mechanics of achieving them open until you see what fixtures you will have to work with.
Different Types of Discount Lighting
The best discount lighting fixtures are the ones that have been discontinued because the manufacturers are introducing new lines. Fixtures that are discontinued because they are highly inefficient, prone to breaking, or just plain ugly are usually not worth even their discounted prices. The difficulty lies in knowing why a line was discontinued. Your guiding principles here should be the respectability of the brand name (research unfamiliar names), the specifications of the individual fixtures (research specs you do not understand), and the trustworthiness of the company selling them to you.
Sometimes you will have the good fortune of finding steep discounts on current lines of fixtures because a retailer is clearing out their warehouse, going out of business, or having an end-of-season sale. These are the best instances in which to find great deals on quality merchandise. (Remember, though, that if a company is going out of business, there are usually no returns and no refunds.) Do a little homework and you are less likely to get burned with inferior merchandise.
Mixing and Matching Lights and Buying Incomplete Sets
Incomplete sets are usually steeply discounted, and mixing different sets can often give you all of the lights you will need, but you can run into problems. Remember that all of the lights will have to be plugged into a power outlet (except in the case of solar lights and battery-powered lights). If the lights are low voltage, they will have to be plugged into transformers to draw household power. If lights operate at separate voltages, they should not be plugged in together. The specs for mixed sets should match, unless you want to run several different power cords.