When I'm out on landscape consults I often get asked what to do about light from a neighbor's security light. Unfortunately, there is nothing that I can do about what another person's choice, but I can give information to anyone out there considering floodlights.
People want lights for security, but they often get wide floodlights that spill over onto the neighbors' property or angle the lights too high and into neighbors' windows. If the goal is to make your property bright enough for someone to see a burglar, then the neighbor's shutters can't be down because of a light glaring into their house. When installing an outdoor light, you should consider using a higher quality light than you can sometimes find at the big box stores. There are a great many attractive, LED floodlights that have sensors for motion or dawn-dusk but that don't spillover onto other properties.
The following drawings show the light from a pair of floodlights on the front of a house. One, the architectural floodlight, has a casing that makes the light a cone shape that illuminates only the yard belonging to that house. The equivalent generic LED floodlight casts a much broader spread of light. You can see how much the light spills over to neighboring properties. On the last pair of 3D drawings, I even turned the drawing around so you can see how much light is hitting the front of the building across the street.
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Architectural Floodlight
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Generic Floodlight
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Architectural Floodlight 3D
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Generic Floodlight 3D
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Architectural Foodlight 3D with
neighboring house
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Generic Floodlight 3D with neighboring house
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