Hi guys, I'm thinking of putting 6 spotlights and 6 pathway lights in my front garden. The blue indicators are the spotlights and the red are for the pathway lights. What type of pathway light should I get? Max spread? And regarding the spotlights - what is best for me? Fat boy or Top dog? Small, medium or large? I am getting a 150w transformer in order to potentially add more lights down the line and 14/2 wire + pro junction connector. Your help would be greatly appreciated. It's difficult to get this done on my own and I would love any advice from people here. Thank you!
Hi there. You want to choose your path lights based on the specific areas and features of your property you want to highlight. Consider the bird's eye view of the garden in the photo I've attached here. The 16ft beam spread from a full size Max spread path light would provide coverage along the lines of what you see in the larger circles. The coverage from the Mini Max fixture's beam spread (8 ft), would look like the smaller circles. If you wanted to highlight something like a single plant, shrub or boulder, you could choose from fixtures within even narrower spreads. There's a mind boggling variety of spotlight fixtures to choose from. The spotlight I recommend most often is the full size TopDog. IMHO, its customizability is unparalleled. If you're someone who likes to be able to control as many aspects of your lighting output as possible, that is the spotlight fixture I'd go with. What you want to keep in mind while shopping are matters like your budget, the size of your fixture (especially if it's important for you to have very low profile fixtures), how bright (or dim) you want your light output to be, your beam spread requirements. In terms of your overall plan, I encourage you to have fun and consider a variety of lighting techniques to add interest and depth to your lighting plan. Assuming it's feasible, you could backlight some of your shrubs and plants by illuminating the fence behind them, you could front light (rather than uplight) certain plants), or you could even downlight certain plants. HTH
