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Low voltage lights utilizes a transformer to reduce regular 120 volt lines to a lower voltage. The most typical low voltage landscape lighting transformers lower the voltage to 12 volts, which is what we used.


Abby and I chose to only set up the landscape illumination in the front of your house. Down the road we may include lights sideways and backyards, however it had not been a priority now - Landscape Lighting Nashville. Abby after that mapped out about where she would such as lights and the amount of. It was useful to take a look at images online to obtain a better feel for exactly how closely spaced or spread out the lights must be.




When we found out where we wanted the lights, we also had to make a note of where we had readily available exterior electric outlets to be able to connect in our transformer( s). In our situation, we had one electric outlet just to the left of our front door and one electrical outlet on each side of your home that we might potentially use.


Preferably one transformer would cover every one of our requirements. We would connect in a transformer to outdoor electrical outlets and run a line of all our lights from there. In our situation, this wasn't feasible considering that it would certainly've needed running a wire under our driveway and also under our front walk.

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The transformers are the most pricey component of the whole process, but there was bit we might do concerning it. The light in zone one would link into a transformer on the left side of our home. The lights in zone two would certainly connect right into a transformer by the front door.


There are just so numerous selections and options that it can be puzzling at. The initial point I did was take a look at reduced voltage lighting alternatives on Amazon.


Then Abby and I travelled to Lowe's and checked out their "Profile" brand of landscape lighting. While it was valuable to see all of the different lighting alternatives personally to get a far better concept of what we required, the Portfolio brand name didn't appear like it was a better than other brand names we had actually taken a look at, and the rates were most definitely more than what I was seeing on Amazon


Below is every little thing we made use of to install our landscape illumination: Transformers will certainly be the largest check here expense of this job. There are a variety of calculators online to assist you determine the power (power level) of your transformer, but it's extremely simple: Build up the complete power level of the lights utilized, multiply the overall wattage by 1.

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We looked at the Lowe's Portfolio brand name of landscape lights, we made a decision to purchase our lights from Amazon. The cost was a lot far better and the lights had whatever we required.


The biggest disadvantage to LEDs utilized to be the cold color temperature, but currently it's easy to locate LED lights in whatever color temperature level you like. We're happy with the color temperature, and it matches our deck lights and lamp article light perfectly.


I was really satisfied with the quality of our lights. They seem extremely sturdy and well made with heavy duty stakes, an angle modification handle, and metal light bodies.


We got the 8 pack of lights yet just ended up utilizing 7 for our format. Prior to purchasing our wire, I utilized a tape measure to obtain an extremely harsh estimate of exactly how much cord I would need. I desired to make certain I had added, so I bought 100 feet of cord.

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The initial number is the gauge of wire. A reduced number visit site or "scale" suggests a thicker wire - Landscape Lighting Nashville. 12 scale wire is thicker than 14 scale cable.




Every online source checklists a little various numbers, but if you are mosting likely to run close to 200 watts or even more, 14 gauge wire may be too little. I went back and forth in between 12/2 and 14/2 cable. I wound up purchasing the 14 scale cord due to the fact that some Amazon customers had commented that the lights we bought used 14 scale wire.


The last thing you require for this job are the wire adapters. The cable adapters are utilized to link the two short cable hairs that extend from each light to the long cord that supplies power to all of the lights in the hair.


The long wire is slid right into a cord owner on the adapter, and after that you tighten down the port and the metal prongs touch directly right into your long wire. Even searching Amazon for connectors, I still couldn't imagine specifically how this would certainly function, so I wound this hyperlink up getting two kinds of adapters.