Exterior Lighting in 3 Hours
After a few days of moving chaos I looked around at my neighbor’s homes and realized that other than a front porch light and 2 lights at the garage, our new home that had so much curb appeal during the day was practically invisible once the sun went down.
In our previous home, the original owner had invested quite a bit in landscape lighting. There was pathway lighting, fountains in the back beds, and a few uplights at the house. After the wires got cut during landscaping work multiple times, I had no choice but to learn how it all worked. It seemed intimidating when it came to trenching through the yard, under walkways, etc but after making enough repairs on my own, I realized it really wasn’t very difficult at all.
So I headed out to my local Lowes and purchased 6 spotlights. I chose 6 LED spotlights with at least 400 lumens for brightness, a transformer to convert a regular outlet to low voltage (which is what almost all landscape lighting uses), and 100 feet of 12 gauge cable.
I started out by laying my lights on the ground to get a feel for where they would be placed. The rule of thumb is to shine one spotlight in between each row of windows. In our old home, we had a spot shining right at one of our windows and it was a bit annoying from the inside.
Then I mounted the transformer to the side of my house by the outlet. Then I simply ran the cabling up against the house creating a very small trench to hide the wire as I ran it. From there, you simply screw each light into the cable and the pins make a connection with the power wire. We have some bushes right up against the house so I had to do some trimming around the areas where my lights were going to avoid branches blocking the light as much as possible.
As far as the wiring goes, it’s pretty much impossible to wire these incorrectly as it makes no difference which cable goes to which terminal in your transformer (and the same goes for screwing each light fixture into the wire you ran).
Once everything was wired up I turned on the transformer to make sure all my lights were working. This particular unit gives you 3 options. On, Auto (which will turn on when dark and off when the sun rises) or a timer that turns the lights on at dusk, and then you can set how many hours you want them to remain on until it shuts off (from 1 to 9 hours). Since the sun sets around 5 pm this time of year I set them for 9 hours so they would remain on until around 2 am. This also matches the schedule I have my other exterior lamps and lights on which I will cover in another post soon. In just 3 hours I transformed my exterior to fit this beautiful neighborhood we are so fortunate to now be a part of.
