There are many landscape lights that you can install yourself, particularly low voltage landscape lighting. We’ve discussed some of the benefits of each kind of landscape lighting in past articles. This guide will help you install landscape lighting.
Photo by Maxsa Innovations
Photo by Hinkley Inc.
Photo by Kichler Lighting
Solar powered landscape lights are the easiest to install! Many models are ready to go right out of the box. Because solar powered lights draw their energy straight from the sun, there is no wiring or other complex installation required. Place the lights somewhere they’ll get plenty of sun throughout the day—six to eight hours is recommended—and you’re good to go!
To install low voltage landscape lighting, you will need a transformer to reduce the 120-volt output from your home electrical system to the 12 volts used by low voltage landscape lights. You will first want to determine how many and what specific low voltage landscape lights you plan to use for your project. Once the quantities and models have been chosen you can then properly size your transformer. The wattage of all the low voltage landscape lights added together needs to be less than 80% of the transformer's capacity. Remember that you may want to leave room on the transformer to add additional fixtures in the future.
Unlike the above examples, we strongly recommend contacting a licensed electrician to install line voltage landscape lighting. Line voltage landscape lighting requires a far more intricate installation process than solar or low voltage landscape lighting, and as such we cannot recommend that you do it yourself without the proper training.
Unlike the above examples, we strongly recommend contacting a licensed electrician to install line voltage landscape lighting. Line voltage landscape lighting requires a far more intricate installation process than solar or low voltage landscape lighting, and as such we cannot recommend that you do it yourself without the proper training.