Mistakes I made

Old smartphones don’t take very good night time photos. The overall lighting, especially from the apparent hot spots in the photo, is more subtle than the picture suggests. I used G4 Infiniti 30s to uplight the oak trees, 3 watt spotlights for the main brick facade and 2 watts everywhere else. It took me nearly a month to get this far (still working on the backyard), stretched out by my first timer inexperience at outdoor lighting, the inability to work beyond 2-3 hours per day due to the Texas Gulf coast heat and humidity this time of year and the mistakes I made along the way, some of which had to be completely redone, others which were merely annoying.

Mistake #1 - I took a wild guess as to how much wire I would need rather than measuring and summing the actual requirement for all of my lights. The 250 feet I originally ordered was consumed in just the first week of laying out the main lines and the first 5 of 15 lights I planned to install. At that point I sat down and actually calculated I would need 410 feet of wire, which eventually grew to just over 500 (it’s addicting; once you start you then find other things you want to illuminate and 15 lights became 22).

Mistake #2 - While waiting for another reel of wire to arrive, I bought some wire at Lowes and Home Depot. All 12-2 landscape lighting wires are not created equal. Southwire and the wire sold by Volt are similar but Cerro brand wire has a much thicker insulation layer. You can easily slip a quarter of an inch of insulation of the Volt wire into the Pro Junction Hub ports before locking the stripped wire end in place, but the thicker Cerro 12-2 wire insulation won’t fit. You have to strip a longer section of insulation from the Cerro wire and butt the insulation up against the port to get it to work in the hub.

Mistake #3 - The first wire I laid was a 120 foot main run to the backyard for the ShadowMaster light my wife wanted next to her flower pots. Rather than roll the wire off of the reel I merely dropped it off, causing the wire to spiral off in a cork screw fashion, one twist for each loop from the reel. I then had to spend 30 minutes in the evening heat untwisting all 120 feet of wire before burying it along the concrete slab of the house. All subsequent wire was rolled out in the garage and cut to length, avoiding the corkscrew twisting effect. Perhaps there is a tool sale opportunity here for the AMP guys, some sort of cheap handle you can slip the reels onto and roll the wire out flat and untwisted (sort of like the old World War II movies where the demolition guy runs, under enemy fire, clutching his reel handle as wire rolls off behind him).

Mistake #4 - Not really a mistake, but something I was never able to master - how to dig wire trenches in wet clay. Installing the ShadowMaster took the better part of 2 days primarily because the clay kept sticking to the shovel. The edging spade I bought a Lowes made cleaner cuts straight down into the soil but always came up with clumps of clay stuck to both sides of the blade. I tried making V cuts with a straight edge shovel but that didn’t work any better. Fortunately most of my later wire runs were in mulched flower beds and were much easier to cut.

Mistake #5 - Not leaving enough slack in my initial main cable runs, both at the transformer and at the three hubs I installed at the front of the house. An extra foot or two of cable at each end, which could have been easily buried when the job was complete, would have made it easier to lift the top off the hub to install the wire runs from the lights (from which I was more careful to leave sufficient excess wire to ease the hub connections).

Mistake #6 - Not keeping a record of which light was connected to which port in each of the hubs. As the project progressed, some spotlights were rearranged or deleted or substituted as my wife and I refined what needed to be illuminated by which beam angle and what didn’t. By not keeping a record of the connections, I had to go through a tedious process of tugging on wires or disconnecting individual wires from the hub to figure out which wire went where and needed to be removed.

Mistake #7 - Stripping the wire ends before inserting them into the base of the hubs or into the DryConn crimp connector exterior casing, thus making a mess of the bare wire strands. I stupidly did this 4 or 5 times before I finally got the wire stripping sequence right (Amateur!).

Mistake #8 - Thinking flexible PVC conduit would be a suitable material for protecting cable runs through my wife’s flower beds, which get shoveled and troweled several times a year. The stuff comes in tight, 25 foot rolls which won’t straighten out unless you lay it out on a driveway in 90+ degree heat, only to partially recoil when it cooled back down.

Mistake #9 - One inch schedule 40 PVC pipe worked better than the flexible PVC conduit for runs through the flower beds, but only the 5 or 10 foot length pipe which can be cut to the desired length. I made the mistake of also buying some 2 foot length pipe and joined the sections with couplers, which would snag the ends of the cable when I tried to force it through the pipe, especially when trying to push 2 lines through a single length of the multi-jointed pipes.

Mistake #10 - After I installed the transformer, I discovered the concrete slab foundation of the house had been sloppily poured underneath the transformer and jutted several inches out into the yard just below the grass line. Unable to bury the main lines in this area, I encased them in the flexible PVC conduit (finally, a good use for the stuff) and then tried to anchor the conduit to the slab to protect it from the lawn care guys. My masonry drill bits work fine for making holes in brick and I thought they would also work on the concrete slab. Wrong. After 15 minutes of drilling, the bit had sunk in only a quarter on an inch. I had to buy a hammer drill and bits to make the anchor holes in the slab, which, much to my joy and relief, took just a minute or two of drilling for each of the 3 holes.


I did do a few things right:

When planning what lights to install, I took pictures of the house, cut out paper triangles of 15, 17, 24, 35, 38, 60 and 110 degrees and overlaid them on the photos to select the best beam spreads. After installing the gutter mounted lights at the corners of the gables I was initially disappointed with the light dispersion. Suspecting it was an aiming issue, I went back to the triangles and determined that the center of the 38 degree light cone was at the opposite upper corner of the window frame in the gable. Once properly aimed, the light dispersion was markedly improved.

I went back and forth with Evan a few times about the best method for making waterproof connections in gutter mounted lights. On the internet I found a high voltage cable splice kit which utilized double heat shrink tubing wrapped connectors and opted for this technique to make my lead wire connections. I offset the ACE splice connectors so they didn’t overlap, sealed them with the supplied heat shrink tubing, then slipped a second, 6 inch long by 5/8 inch ID heat shrink tube over the entire offset assembly and heat shrunk it. The resulting skinny, rock hard connection is still narrow enough to slip through the gutter mount bracket threaded connection, although it is a whole lot easier to precut the wires, preassemble the lamps in the mounting brackets and do all of the wire splicing and heat shrinking on the workbench rather than on a ladder at the gutter.

To drop the gutter mounted light lead wire down through the down spout, I attached a heavy, round lamp shade finial to one end of a 15 foot piece of twine and tied and taped the other end to the lead wire. The finial easily cascaded down to the ground and it was simply a matter of pulling on the twine to get the wire down to the hub.

I was disappointed in the light dispersion from the BuddyPro Plus puck lights that I had attached to the back of steel light switch cover plates and recessed into the soffit over the garage door brick pillars. I was hoping for a narrower beam pattern to focus on the plants below the lights. Despite recessing the lights, glare was also an issue when standing close to the house. Some small glare guards I found on the internet, when attached to the mounting plates, took care of both issues.


I hope someone finds this useful. It’s been an interesting Covid, stay at home project.

Bob Mason

 

Thank you. And you're welcome. Bob