Landscape path lights are not just about providing a safe walkway to your home or security for the exterior. Pathway lights can paint your property with a pleasing mixture of glowing, warm spots of light that highlight or define the walkway or garden areas.
As long as you have an outdoor GFCI outletyou can run wired low voltage lights almost as easily as solar-powered lights. For serious, long-term landscape path lightingforget the solar lights: you need to plug into a GFCI outlet on the outside of your house.
Wired path lights, whether line or low voltage, both provide the benefits of:. Low voltage wired lights will never be as easy to install as solar lights, but they come close. As long as you have an outdoor GFCI outlet located within about 10 to 15 feet of your first light location, the rest of the installation is a matter of laying cable and clipping in lights. Should you buy low voltage or line voltage walkway lights? The names sound similar and are easily confused, yet they are vastly different.
Line voltage path lights use thick cable ; must be buried 18 inches underground; must be run Low Voltage Landscape Hanging Lights Key through conduits ; and need weather-tight junction boxes.
While line voltage lights are perfectly fine and in many ways are preferable to low voltage lights, they are not well suited for the average do-it-yourselfer. Low voltage lights are most commonly sold and installed by homeowners.
They are easily identifiable because they have three elements:. Path light kits are a good way to begin lighting your path and yard, though quality may be lacking with some kit products.
Instead of creating your pathway light system from scratch, piece by piece, you may wish to purchase a unified kit. Low voltage path light kits come with a transformer, cable, and between four to eight pathway lights.
Less expensive entry-level pathway kits are often lacking in quality. Consider a quality kit of about six lights that comes with a transformer, all-metal light fixtures, and hard wiring into the cable, as opposed to using less reliable push-pierce connectors. Elements of lower quality path lights include all-plastic light construction, faulty connectors, and potentially defective transformers.
Still, if creating a path light system from scratch is a stumbling block for you, low voltage landscape hanging lights mod, you can do worse than purchasing an economy-level path lighting kit. If you would like to purchase the parts individually, just make sure that you keep the three major components in mind: transformer, cable, and lights. Since kit systems already have the correctly sized transformer, low voltage landscape hanging lights mod, in order to do this piecemeal you will need to calculate the correct transformer needed for your light group.
The transformer's wattage rating dictates how many and which kinds of lights you can plug into the. Whether you buy a low voltage landscape hanging lights mod lighting kit or assemble it from scratch, the heart of that system is the transformer. Once you have a transformer, you can add more lights, low voltage landscape hanging lights mod, change their positions, and even incorporate lights of a different brand, as long as they are electrically compatible. As one example, if you begin with a path light kit that has a watt transformer, six path lights, and two floodlights, can you add more lights to the system?
Break it down this way:. First, add up the watts of each fixture, then come up with their total combined power draw. Next, look at your transformer, rated low voltage landscape hanging lights mod watts:. Now, subtract your total fixture power draw from your transformer. The watt transformer minus the watt tier fixture draw leaves 26 watts available for extra fixtures. So, in this common scenario, you could add one more floodlight or three more tier lights.
For more effective and permanent lighting, purchase wired path lights that plug into an outdoor outlet, not solar lights. Solar path lights have their place, providing minimal light when you need it quickly, like for a backyard party or for surprise guests who are unfamiliar with your property. Solar pathway lights install easily just by pushing them into soft ground. Because solar path lights are cheap, your purchase commitment is low. But they also have some disadvantages:.
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