Outdoor Lighting

Bay Area Greenscapes can help you enhance the nighttime curb appeal of your home—and add a measure of safety and security—with low-voltage landscape lighting. Exterior-grade fixtures are typically placed along walkways and driveways, but they’re also ideal for illuminating steps, trees, stone walls, fences, and other prominent landscape features. Here’s an out 8-step process:

• Initial Consultation – The process of adding lighting starts with an initial meeting to learn how the landscape will be used. Whether it’s for kids to kick a ball around or to highlight a special garden, the design of the lighting always follows what is happening in the yard and how people will use it.

• Final Plan – A written plan follows the consultation. We make any corrections or additions to the plan before any other work is begun.

• Layout lights – When we are ready to go on-site to install the lighting, the first step is to lay them out in the landscape and make sure everyone on the crew is in agreement. This ensures a smooth installation process.

• Mount the transformer box – The transformer box plugs into a 120-volt outlet and it converts the electricity from the house to a lower current so it can power low-voltage landscape lighting through timers, remote controls, and photocells to sense light.

• Layout wiring  – We then wire the low-voltage lighting in a variety of thicknesses, from 8 to 14 gauges. The number of lights used and the wattage of those lights determine the gauge of the wire needed. Copper wire and a marine-grade tin-coated wire are both good choices. When running wires through a bed of annual flowers where people are likely to dig, your landscaper will “sleeve” the wire in a sturdy pipe so it isn’t broken by normal gardening activities.

• Scope out runs – It’s important to carefully plan how many lights are run off of each set of wires. While a transformer can control multiple “runs”, each run can only power so many watts. The pros suggest leaving enough room on both the transformer and on each run to allow upgrades, in case you decide to add more fixtures later.

• Test the system – We’ll then do a voltage read on every light, and make sure all of our connections are good to catch any problems before we bury the wiring.

• Bury the wire – In most cases, the wire doesn’t need to be buried very deep. In fact, 2-6 inches will often do. It just needs to be invisible in the finished landscape, and out of the way of tools that might damage it. Some municipalities have regulations about how deep the wire must be buried, so it’s a good idea to check with your city just in case.

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