Suggestions needed for novice. I want to run lighting the along the inside of my backyard fence. It is 425 ft long. I'm placing 1.5 watt led lights at every other post with an average distance between lights of about 15 ft. There will be a total of 30 of the led lights. I only have an outlet on one side of the house by the fence. I realize the distance is a huge factor with the voltage drop. Any advice in design would be greatly appreciated.
I see this is old, but maybe you haven't done the project or perhaps did and it didn't work out as you liked. Or maybe someone else would see it. Anyway... You don't describe your back yard, but let's assume it's a rectangle of sorts with the house at one end. The run is far too long to just start at one end and keep going from post to post. The end of the run would be dim at best, if it even worked. Let's further assume that we can divide the fence into roughly three sections of about 140' each. I'm thinking two side runs and one at the back, but it doesn't really matter. You just want three segments of about equal length. What I would do is start with three lengths of the largest direct-bury cable you can find and run it through the most direct possible route to approximately the middle of each section of fence, then run 12 ga. line from there to the end of each section, and connect each post light along the run of 12 ga line (or larger). Repeat for the other two sections of fence. You'll end up with a sort of star at the transformer connected to three Ts. I hope that all makes sense. I've added a (fairly crude) drawing. You'll almost certainly need to connect to the highest available voltage on your transformer, but follow the guidelines in the instructions. This setup should give you a max run on any lamp of, hopefully, less than 200 feet, and the furthest lamp from the transformer should be no more than about 70 or 75 feet further than the nearest lamp, assuming the fence sections are about 140' each, so the lighting should be reasonably evenly balanced.
