Owensboro, Kentucky · since 1998
Outdoor lighting that starts on a drawing board.
We are NiteLiters, and we design low-voltage landscape lighting for homes and commercial property across Kentucky, Southern Indiana and Northern Tennessee. Every system begins as a measured drawing of your property, divided into zones you can light now or years from now.
Twenty-eight years of exactly one trade.
Gary Mitchell started NiteLiters in Owensboro in 1998 to bring real lighting design to western Kentucky, and we have never done anything else since. No Christmas installs. No landscaping. No irrigation. Low-voltage outdoor lighting is the whole business, which is why a small team here can go as deep into it as it does.
Our designers are certified through the Association of Outdoor Lighting Professionals, where we are a charter member. We are members and graduates of the International Landscape Lighting Institute, and we teach there. The work has taken several national design awards.
Most electricians will tell you they can do low-voltage lighting. What they know is line voltage. They have not spent twenty years learning how far a 12-volt run can go before the last fixture dims, or how to get cable up a brick wall and leave the mortar looking untouched.
Same house, before and after.
Before, the lit doorway was about the only thing you could make out from the lawn. Drag the line across to see what the finished system does.
Design, installation, and the twenty-five years after.
Roughly three quarters of the fixtures on a NiteLiters job are mounted on the house rather than stuck in the mulch. That is the difference between a lighting design and a row of path lights.
Landscape Lighting Design
A designer walks the property, then draws it. The drawing is what gets built and what every technician works from afterwards.
Inside
- What a design fee buys you
- How a property is broken into zones
- Why the drawing outlives the install
Outdoor Lighting Installation
Cable under the drive, through mortar joints, up into the canopy. Then we come back after dark and switch it on with you standing there.
Inside
- Running cable under drives and walks
- Transformers, wire gauge and voltage drop
- The Reveal: the night we turn it on
Repair Service
A landscaper's spade through a cable, water in a socket, a transformer that stopped. Finding the one fault is the whole job.
Inside
- Why one bad lamp kills a whole run
- What we can and cannot take on
- What a service visit actually costs
Maintenance Plans
Quarterly or twice a year, a technician re-aims every fixture, cleans every lens and replaces what has drifted or failed.
Inside
- Quarterly vs semiannual visits
- The two no-charge 90-day checks
- What we do to a system every visit
Architectural & Facade
Stone grazed so the coursing reads. Brick washed so it does not. The material decides which one, not the fixture catalogue.
Inside
- Grazing versus washing a wall
- Lighting a roofline without glare
- Why colour temperature changes a facade
Tree Lighting & Moonlighting
Fixtures thirty feet up in the canopy, aimed down. What lands on the lawn is branch shadow, not a light fitting.
Inside
- How a fixture gets 30 feet up a tree
- Growth, guy wires and re-aiming
- Downlighting a drive without a runway
Pool, Patio & Deck
Water reflects everything you point at it. Getting a pool right is mostly about where the light is not.
Inside
- Lighting water without a glare sheet
- Step, rail and coping detail
- Keeping the fixtures out of sight lines
Commercial
Churches, memorials, sculpture and campuses. Low voltage woven into a line-voltage scheme that was there first.
Inside
- Low voltage inside a line-voltage scheme
- Monuments, sculpture and signage
- Working around a facility's hours
What brought you here tonight?
That is a design problem, not a fixture problem. We come out, walk the property with you and give budget numbers for each area, then draw the whole thing so you can see what the front, the sides and the back would each cost before you commit to any of it.
Usually one fault, not many. Low-voltage runs are wired in series along a cable, so a single cut, a corroded socket or a failed transformer takes out everything downstream of it. Finding the one fault is the job.
Almost always glare. A fixture aimed anywhere near the water turns the surface into a mirror pointed at your eyes. The good light for a pool deck generally comes from above, out of the trees and the structure around it.
Call the office and ask. We will tell you honestly whether it is something we can take on. Where we do, a technician traces the runs, finds the transformers and tells you what is worth repairing and what has reached the end of its life.
That is moonlighting, and it is our favourite thing to do. Fixtures go high into the canopy and aim down, so what you see on the lawn is the shadow of the branches. During the day you would have to know where to look to find them.
We have lit churches, war memorials, public sculpture and campus buildings across three states. Commercial property usually already has line-voltage lighting, and the work is deciding how low voltage sits inside that without fighting it.
Four kinds of light, one switch at a time.
Uplights, downlights, tree lights and the lights along the walk each do a different job. This is one of our properties at dusk, darkened here so you can switch each kind on by itself and see what it does.
Places of art and beauty, is how Gary puts it.
Every photograph on this site is a NiteLiters system on a real property. None of it is stock.
Why we ask for a design fee before we quote a job.
Most companies price a lighting job by counting fixtures. We price it by drawing your property first, because the drawing is what tells us how many fixtures it actually needs.
The consultation itself carries no charge. A designer comes out, you walk the property together, and you leave that conversation with budget ranges for each area of the house. If you want to go further, we quote a design fee scaled to the size of the property and the hours the drawing will take.
What you get back is an architectural drawing showing every fixture, every cable run, every transformer and every lamp specification, with the property broken into zones: front, each side, rear, pool, trees, drive. Each zone carries its own price.
That matters because almost nobody does the whole property at once. You might light the front this year and the pool in three years, and when you do, the plan is already drawn and the new work matches what is already there. Gary calls the drawing the heart of the system, and our technicians are still reading it a decade later.
We do not stock fixtures or lamps. Every job is ordered for that drawing, usually across about three manufacturers, chosen for what each one does best on your property.
How a job runs
We walk it with you
No charge, about an hour. You get budget ranges by area before anyone talks about a contract.
The drawing
Measured plan, zones priced separately, every lamp and transformer specified.
Built to the plan
Half down at signing. Cable buried, mortar re-tucked, fixtures set where the drawing says.
The night we switch it on
Our crew stays late and turns your system on with you there for the first time. We adjust anything that is not right, then collect the balance.
Then 90 days again
Two full inspections in the first six months. You get an invoice showing what each would have cost, credited to zero.
What owners say on Google
Where we work most weeks
We take outdoor lighting work across western Kentucky, southern Indiana and the counties north of Nashville.
- Owensboro, KYHome county. Griffith Avenue, East Parish, Old Owensboro.
- Evansville, INRiverside and Lincolnshire historic homes, and the east side.
- Newburgh, INThe historic district and the ridge lots above the river.
- Henderson, KYTobacco-era Italianate along North Main and Alves.
- Bowling Green, KYCollege Hill, Upper East Main, and the newer subdivisions.
- Jasper, INGerman-heritage masonry and Dubois County church work.
Also on our schedule
Louisville · Paducah · Elizabethtown · Morganfield · Calhoun · Central City · Hartford in Kentucky. Terre Haute · Bloomington · New Albany in Indiana. Clarksville · Gallatin · Hendersonville · Goodlettsville · Lebanon in Tennessee.
Service beyond the sale.
The night of the Reveal you are handed a folder: your warranty, your service agreement, and the manufacturer warranty on every product we put in the ground.
Lamps we install carry a five-year warranty. If one fails inside that window we come out, replace it and send the old one back to the supplier. You are not charged for the lamp or the trip.
Then there are two full inspections, at ninety days and at a hundred and eighty. Each one comes with an invoice showing what that visit would have cost, credited in full, because it is part of what you already bought.
We do not offer financing. We take credit cards, half at signing and half the night we turn the system on. On new construction we will usually split it into thirds instead.
What people ask before they call
No. The consultation carries no charge.
A designer comes to the property, walks it with you and gives you budget ranges for each area. The charge starts only if you decide you want the drawing, at which point we quote a design fee based on the size of the property and the hours the plan will take.
Because the drawing is a real piece of work and it belongs to you afterwards.
A company that quotes without drawing is estimating from memory on the day. Our plan specifies every fixture, cable run, transformer and lamp on your property, and it is what our technicians read when they come back to service the system years later. It is also what lets you light one zone now and know exactly what the next one will cost.
Yes, and most people do.
The design divides the property into zones: front, each side, rear, pool, trees, drive. Each zone is priced on its own. You might take the front this year and the back garden in four years. Because the whole plan already exists, the later work matches the earlier work instead of looking bolted on.
That is the part we are most stubborn about.
Cable gets buried, run under drives and walkways, and where it has to climb a brick wall we grout out the mortar joint, lay the cable in and re-tuckpoint over it. About three quarters of the fixtures on a typical job are mounted on the structure itself. Our camouflaging photographs are all taken in daylight, because that is the only time the work is hard.
Call the office and ask, and you will get a straight answer either way.
Where we do take the work, a technician traces the runs, locates the transformers and tells you honestly what is repairable and what has reached the end of its life. Fixtures from a big-box store are usually the latter, and we will say so rather than keep charging you to revive them.
Western Kentucky, southern Indiana and northern Tennessee: Louisville, Bowling Green, Evansville, Jasper and down toward Clarksville.
We work in Evansville and Newburgh constantly, Bowling Green is a strong area for us, and Jasper has been busy lately. For properties near the edge of that area we group work by week.
Usually the opposite.
Bright lights create hard shadows, and a hard shadow is a place a person can stand and not be seen. A lower, more evenly distributed scheme lets your eye adapt and makes the whole property legible. Safety lighting that actually works tends to be dimmer than people expect.
No. We only do low-voltage outdoor lighting.
No holiday installs, no landscaping, no irrigation. One trade is the reason a company this size can keep certified designers and cross-trained service technicians on staff year round.
Three ways in
Let's look at your property after dark
A designer comes out, walks the property with you and gives budget numbers by area. That visit carries no charge. If you want the drawing, we quote a design fee from there.
NiteLiters Inc. · 729 Cumberland St, Owensboro, KY 42303
Monday to Friday, 8:00am to 5:00pm