How Landscape Lighting Nashville can Save You Time, Stress, and Money.

Landscape Lighting Nashville for Beginners

This post contains affiliate links. To find out more, see my disclosures below. Reduced voltage illumination makes use of a transformer to lower normal 120 volt lines to a lower voltage. For landscape illumination, this is commonly 24 or 12 volts. The most common low voltage landscape lighting transformers decrease the voltage to 12 volts, which is what we utilized.


Down the road we might include lights to the side and yards, however it had not been a concern right currently. Abby then mapped out around where she would certainly such as lights and exactly how many.




Once we determined where we desired the lights, we also needed to take down where we had offered outdoor electric outlets to be able to plug in our transformer( s). In our instance, we had one electrical outlet simply to the left of our front door and one electrical outlet on each side of your house that we could potentially make use of.


Preferably one transformer would cover all of our requirements. We would certainly plug in a transformer to exterior electrical outlets and run a line of all our lights from there. In our scenario, this had not been feasible given that it would certainly've called for running a cord under our driveway and additionally under our front stroll.

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The transformers are the most expensive component of the whole procedure, but there was bit we can do concerning it. The light in zone one would certainly plug into a transformer on the left side of our house. The lights in zone two would connect right into a transformer by the front door.


Purchasing every one of the essential tools for this project was one of the most frustrating component. There are simply so many options and options that it can be perplexing at. I'll stroll you through our equipment decisions. The very first thing I did was have a look at low voltage illumination choices on Amazon.


After that Abby and I travelled to Lowe's and took a look at their "Portfolio" brand name of landscape illumination. While it was handy to see all of the various lighting options personally to obtain a better idea of what we needed, the Portfolio Look At This brand name really did not appear like it was a higher top quality than various other brand names we had taken a look at, and the costs were absolutely greater than what I was top article seeing on Amazon


Here is every little thing we made use of to mount our landscape lighting: Transformers will certainly be the most significant cost of this project. There are a variety of calculators online to help you establish the power (wattage) of your transformer, but it's very straightforward: Add up the total electrical power of the lights utilized, increase the complete power level by 1.

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We looked at the Lowe's Profile brand name of landscape lights, we determined to purchase our lights from Amazon. The cost was much better and the lights had whatever we required.


The biggest disadvantage to LEDs made use of to be the cold shade temperature, however currently it's very easy to locate LED lights in whatever shade temperature you like. We're satisfied with the color temperature, and it matches our deck lights and light message light nicely.


I was truly satisfied with the quality of our lights. They appear extremely durable and well made with hefty duty risks, an angle change handle, and steel light bodies.


We acquired the 8 pack of lights Just ended up using seven for our layout. Before acquiring our wire, I made use of a tape action to get an extremely rough estimate of how much wire I would require. I wished to see to it I had added, so I bought 100 feet of wire.

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The very first number is the scale of cable. A reduced number or "scale" means a thicker cord - Landscape Lighting Nashville. 12 gauge wire is thicker than 14 gauge cable.




Every online resource listings slightly different numbers, however if you are mosting likely to run near 200 watts or more, 14 gauge wire may be too tiny. I went back and forth between 12/2 and 14/2 cable. I wound up purchasing the 14 gauge cord since some Amazon customers had commented that the lights we bought utilized 14 scale cable.


Don't stress regarding the cable selection. For click now the vast majority of domestic landscape lights tasks, 14 scale or 12 scale will certainly function simply fine. The last point you require for this project are the wire adapters. They are low-cost, and there are lots of options. The wire ports are made use of to attach both short wire hairs that prolong from each light to the long cord that gives power to all of the lights in the strand.


The lengthy wire is moved right into a wire owner on the port, and after that you tighten up down the connector and the metal prongs touch directly into your lengthy wire. Even looking on Amazon for adapters, I still could not envision exactly how this would certainly work, so I wound up purchasing two kinds of connectors.