There are some very practical reasons for outdoor lighting.
A lot of entertaining happens in the evening,
and good outdoor lighting makes it a safer place to walk,
but well-placed outdoor lighting will also
create great atmosphere in your garden,
so you can enjoy it long after the sun goes down.
A decent outdoor lighting setup doesn't
have to burn you in the pocket.
And you'll be surprised just how easy it is to put in.
I'm going to show you how to plan and install lighting
at your place.
Rightio, I've measured up and drawn
a scale plan of our garden.
Now, I've got two really lovely big trees here
I'd like to highlight, so I'm going
to put a light in the base of those-- one there and there.
Now, the path down the side of the house--
I'd like to put some bollard lights down
the side there just to illuminate that-- make
it a little bit safer, as well.
Now, around the side of the house
I've got some steps that I'd like to illuminate for safety,
and we've got a really nice feature garden,
we're going to put some lights in there, as well.
OK, I've had my sparky attach our outdoor power supply.
I've got this situated in the garden
just because we're so far away from the house.
Normally you'd have this attached
to the side of your house.
Now I've got my 150 watt transformer.
All I have to do very simply is just
plug that straight into the box, and then we
run our power lines off that.
Now I've plugged in a 150 watt transformer outside,
so that means I can plug in a raft of different lights
into that so long as it doesn't exceed 150 watts.
Now, I can tell that by, on the side of my box here,
I've got 50 watts for my spotlights
I'm going to use to highlight my trees.
And I'm going to put these bollards
down the side of our path.
These are only one watt each.
So let's just plug all that onto our plan.
This tree here-- I've a 50 watt and another 50 watt
highlighting that tree.
Now, I've got six one watt bollards
down the side of the path.
So let's add all that up--
106 watts.
Righty-o, so I've got 106 watts.
I'm well under our 150 watt transformer.
Now it's time to run our lines.
To run the one watt bollards, I'm
using a cable with six separate power sockets.
There's a bunch of different cables,
and they all work with all the different lights in our system.
Start at the transformer and work your way out.
The cable I'm using is 15 metres long and has a socket
every two meters for the lights.
OK, so I'm just going to run my cable all the way out
to our farthest point and then plug our lights in from there.
Position your lights where they look the best.
Each light has an extra two metres
of cable, which allows you to easily reach the power
sockets on the main line.
Then it's just a matter of plugging in and hiding
the cable to keep things nice and tidy.
Thanks to a splitter at the transformer,
I'm powering up the other side of the garden, too.
OK, I've just run my second line from our transformer.
I've just plugged in my 50 watt.
Now I'm just about to run my 10 metre extension
cable for my second 50 watt to illuminate that tree.
Now, some of my cables I'm just concealing
behind the back of the fence here with cable ties.
In other areas, I'll be hiding it in the ground
about four inches down.
The good thing about this stuff is, if you hit it with a spade,
there's no drama whatsoever because it's all low voltage.
You're not going to get electrocuted.
Now, with a little tidy up I can position
the last light and power it up by connecting
to the end of the 10 metre extension.
Rightio, I'm around the back of the house now,
and I've just run this extension cable for my second 150 watt
transformer.
I'm going to throw that all the way down the path,
and I've got a lovely little feature garden here
I'm going to illuminate with four of these 20 watt halogens.
Now, down these steps I've got these nice little one
watt that are just going to sit on the top
of the deck nice and flush.
So let's add all that up.
Four times 20 watt equals 80 watts,
and seven times 1 watt equals 7 watts.
That's a total of 87 watts.
We've got 150 to play with.
We're sweet as.
OK, I've got this three-way splitter here.
That means I can run one set of wires into our feature garden,
and then another set of wires down our steps
to plug all those in.
I've marked the deck where the center of my one watt deck
lights will go, and I'm going to use my hole saw
to cut out the holes.
OK, so I've just used my 60 mil hole
saw to drill our hole to take our one watt deck light.
I've already put our little extension cable on there.
I've fished that down the hole, and that'll
plug in to our extension.
Now, after I've done all this, I'm
going to hide all this extension cable underneath our deck--
save me digging it into the soil.
Once connected, pull the cable through the hole,
and push the light down flush onto the deck.
Easy.
Right, from our three way splitter,
I've run an extension cable with four outlets on it.
It's going to take these four 20 watt lights.
We'll just plug that in and bury the rest of the cable
about four inches deep into our garden,
and we can just place our light quite nicely under that tree.
And once that light goes down, we
can get a really good position on that.
Rightio, there we go.
We've created a little bit of depth to our feature garden,
made our steps nice and safe.
You know what?
That really was easy as.