Outdoor Low Voltage Lighting

While it’s a good idea to leave most lighting installation to the experts, there are some things it’s good for you know about different types of lighting, especially regarding voltage, when you’re shopping for outdoor lights. First, you should learn how to tell the difference between high voltage and low voltage outdoor lighting.  This is perhaps the easiest part of shopping for lighting for your yard—if the cable is buried or if the lines are up high, stretching from your home to a nearby dusk to dawn light, for instance, it’s high voltage lighting.

High voltage lighting, because of the potential dangers, needs to be installed by a contractor or electrician.  If you go to add high voltage lighting to your home, in a dusk to dawn light that will pull power directly from your house electricity, for instance, you’ll probably need to get a building permit.  The lines have to be buried or very-well protected if they’re exposed to ensure that they’re waterproof. The lights, however, can be larger and will often burn brighter than low voltage outdoor lighting.  They will also cost more to operate.
Low voltage outdoor lighting, however, is much simpler to install, so many homeowners do it themselves.  There’s no need to bury cables.  You’ll want to hide them for aesthetics, of course, but you can hide them without making such a permanent change to your landscape as you would if you buried the lines.  So outdoor low voltage lighting is portable—you can move it, and make changes once it’s installed, something that’s extremely difficult if not impossible to do with high voltage lighting.

Because of the low voltage required for the lighting, the safety hazards of working with these lights are minimized. Even someone who doesn’t know much about electricity can purchase a kit with instructions and install low-voltage outdoor lighting themselves. Outdoor low voltage lighting doesn’t carry the same deadly shock danger as high voltage, and some lights are even designed for underwater use. Installing low voltage lighting is as simple as plugging in the transformer and attaching the wires to the light fixtures.  Almost anyone can install them, which accounts for much of their popularity.

Outdoor low voltage lighting is less expensive than high voltage lighting and it costs less to operate because the fixtures are typically smaller. The biggest drawback to this type of lighting is that because the lights are low voltage, the lights can easily appear dimmer, especially if the cables are particularly long.  And because these lights won’t be tapped directly into the high-voltage house circuit, they require their own transformer.

Installing the transformer properly, and making sure you’ve chosen the right type and size box if it didn’t come in a kit, is the most difficult part of installing low voltage outdoor lighting and the one that prompts many people to have a contractor handle the installation. Look over the instructions before calling your contractor, though, and you might be surprised to find that you can do it yourself.