Center Your Landscape on a Fiber Optic Fountain
A fiber optic fountain can be one of the most powerful elements that you can add to your Houston landscaping plan. Along with other illuminated water features such as swimming pools, natural gardens, wildlife ponds, and streams, it will generate a special aura derived from two of mankind’s most powerful and most ancient symbols.
Water is a unique symbol associated with both physical and spiritual life. It communicates both emotional and mystical significance. Light holds an equally powerful position in the world of symbolism, carrying with it connotations of higher thought, divine revelation, and purity. By consciously combining these two symbols, you will add a multi-dimensional aspect to your property that will significantly increase its curb appeal.
There have always been various types of lights used to illuminate bodies of waters. Some cannot be exposed to water itself due to the risk of short circuit. Others must be housed in expensive waterproof fixtures that will allow them to be submerged. Others must be monitored closely to prevent them from overheating the water.
However a fiber optic fountain faces none of these challenges. Fiber optic cables only transmit light—they do not produce it. The electrical power for the lights is far removed from the water and protected from the risk of short circuit. Cables do not transmit heat, either, so they can be used as a cool lighting source within swimming pools, natural pond waterfalls, and bird ponds.
Their lack of heat, and their total reliance on remote electrical power, makes them even safer to use for underwater lighting than many LEDs. The worse thing that can happen in a fiber optic fountain is for a few cables to cease transmitting light. There is no risk to humans or animals if this happens, and the cables can always be replaced.
Not only is this a much safer and more efficient way to illuminate any water feature, it is also preferable for certain types of lighting effects. While LED lights are becoming increasingly sophisticated as underwater light fixtures, most produce a very static light output. On the other hand, a group of optical cables in a swimming pool star field design, or fiber optic fountain, can be programmed to generate multiple patterns of colors that continuously change.
This makes optical cable the best source to date for special effects lighting from within the body of water itself. The ends of the cables that transmit the light can literally extend to a point just beneath the edge of the water and create dazzling displays of shifting color and alternating, timed brightening and dimming effects.
Many people prefer to have a fiber optic fountain designed in the shape of a waterfall for this reason. Placing arrays of lights in the very interior of a cascading sheet of water has an effect that no up lighting, down lighting, or back lighting fixtures can equal. Other fountain designs can also be supported by placing optical cables in the fountain housing, or by running the cables upward through the water stream to light it from the inside out.