You’ve finally accomplished a project you’ve been working on for weeks, even months: creating the perfect outdoor lighting setup for your home. Lighting can make a big difference to your landscape, allowing you to enjoy your backyard and garden well into the night and ensuring that it looks its very best at all times. However, you might run into an issue if you live in an area prone to hurricanes.

Hurricanes can demolish outdoor lighting quite quickly, and can even turn an already dangerous situation into something even more hazardous. When you’re dealing with outdoor lighting, water damage can be catastrophic. As such, it’s important to work with a parking lot and area lighting service to ensure that your lighting is as hurricane-proof as possible — especially if you live in Florida, where, according to Trip Savvy, 40% of all East Coast hurricanes make landfall every year.

With that in mind, let’s look into what you should do to protect your outdoor lighting from hurricanes.

1. Work With the Experts

Nobody is going to know how you should protect your outdoor lighting than a professional parking lot and area lighting service. If you had your outdoor lighting professionally installed, you should work with the service to ensure that all of your bases are properly covered. Take any tips that they offer seriously.

2. Cut Off the Power Supply Before Storms

While some storms come on quickly and are difficult to predict, others can be predicted well ahead of time. If you know that a storm is coming, you need to take preventative measures to ensure that your lighting is secure and safe. All of the gas and electric supply needs to be cut off from the fixtures. Light fixtures with gas need to be taken down without the brackets, while light fixtures with electricity need to be taken down with the brackets. If the fixtures can’t be removed, the power supply at least needs to be cut short.

3. Use Covers

It’s important for you to use covers on your lights. See if you can source some from a parking lot and area lighting service. These will protect your lights physically while cutting off the power will protect them internally.

Remember: when in doubt, ask the pros for help! You’ve invested too much time and energy in your lights to let a storm ruin them.