Getting My Landscape Lighting Nashville To Work

The Facts About Landscape Lighting Nashville Uncovered

Low voltage illumination utilizes a transformer to lower normal 120 volt lines to a reduced voltage. The most usual reduced voltage landscape lighting transformers reduce the voltage to 12 volts, which is what we made use of.


Down the road we may include lights to the side and yards, however it wasn't a concern right now. Abby then mapped out around where she would certainly like lights and exactly how many.




Once we identified where we wanted the lights, we additionally had to make a note of where we had available outside electric outlets to be able to connect in our transformer( s). In our situation, we had one electric outlet simply to the left of our front door and one outlet on each side of your home that we can possibly make use of.


Preferably one transformer would certainly cover all of our demands. We would certainly connect in a transformer to exterior outlets and run a line of all our lights from there. In our circumstance, this had not been feasible considering that it would certainly've needed running a cable under our driveway and also under our front walk.

Excitement About Landscape Lighting Nashville

However, the transformers are the most costly component of the entire process, however there was little we can do concerning it. The light in area one would certainly connect into a transformer on the left side of our residence. The lights in zone 2 would connect into a transformer by the front door.


There are simply so many selections and alternatives that it can be confusing at. The first thing I did was take a look at reduced voltage illumination alternatives on Amazon.


Then Abby and I took a journey to Lowe's and looked at their "Portfolio" brand name of landscape illumination. While it was useful to see every one of the different lighting choices personally to get a far better concept of what we required, the Portfolio brand name really did not look like it was a better than various other brand names we had considered, and the prices were absolutely higher than what I was seeing on Amazon


Below is whatever we used to install our landscape lighting: Transformers will certainly be the most significant cost of this task. There read this post here are a variety of calculators online to assist you determine the power (power level) of your transformer, yet it's really best site basic: Build up the complete electrical power of the lights used, increase the complete wattage by 1.

The Best Strategy To Use For Landscape Lighting Nashville

They have 45, 120, 200, 300, 600, and 900 watt options. We purchase 2 45 watt transformers and one 120 watt transformer. Although we considered the Lowe's Portfolio brand name of landscape lights, we chose to purchase our lights from Amazon. The rate was better and the lights had everything we required.


The largest disadvantage to LEDs made use of to be the chilly color temperature, but now it's very easy to locate LED lights in whatever color temperature you choose. We're happy with the shade temperature, and it matches our veranda lights and light message light perfectly.


I think this provides the best result of beaming up on the side of home. A number of flood lamps beaming up on your house might have overwhelmed everything. I was truly pleased with the high quality of our lights. They seem really strong and well made with hefty responsibility stakes, an angle adjustment handle, and steel light bodies.


, I used a tape measure to obtain a really harsh estimate of just how much cable I would require. I desired to make sure I had extra, so I purchased 100 feet of cable.

Landscape Lighting Nashville for Dummies

14/2 or also 12/2. The very first number is the gauge of wire. A reduced number or "scale" my blog implies a thicker wire. 12 gauge wire is thicker than 14 gauge wire. The second number is the number of strands of cord in the wire. 14/2 implies that it is 14 scale cord with two strands in the cable.




Every online resource listings slightly different numbers, yet if you are going to run close to 200 watts or even more, 14 scale cord may be also small. I went back and forth in between 12/2 and 14/2 cable. I wound up acquiring the 14 gauge cable due to the fact that some Amazon reviewers had actually commented that the lights we bought utilized 14 scale cable.


Do not stress and anxiety regarding the cable selection. For the substantial bulk of property landscape lights tasks, 14 scale or 12 scale will certainly work just fine. The last point you need for this task are the cable connectors. The good news is, they are economical, and there are lots of options. The cord connectors are used to connect both short wire hairs that expand from each light to the lengthy cable that supplies power to every one of the lights in the strand.


The lengthy wire is slid right into a wire holder on the connector, and afterwards you tighten down the connector and the steel prongs touch straight into your long cable. Even looking on Amazon for ports, I still couldn't visualize exactly just how this would function, so I finished up purchasing two sorts of connectors.