DIY Outdoor Electric Lighting for Your Home’s Walkway
How to install outdoor electric lights:
The advantages to choosing outdoor electric lights to illuminate a walkway are that they bring your home up in value while providing a structurally sound security asset for the homeowner to enjoy. Unlike solar walkway lights, outdoor electric lights have a lifespan that can last decades.
In your mind, regard the choice to install outdoor electric lights as simply extending your existing household wiring into a new room in your home. Beginners in electricity home improvement projects can tackle an outdoor electric light project with success. All that is happening is that you are placing your lights, running a wire along a trench, and hooking up your transformer with easy-to-follow package directions and pictures.
1. Choose outdoor electric lights that harmonize with your house age, or go backward in time and install antiques or antique look-a-likes that will always look nice in the yard. Stay away from current fashion trends, when trends become outdated – your solid old styles will still be pleasing to look at.
2. Many people enjoy having a tall post lamp or two along their walkways. It is fine to plan both tall and short outdoor electric lights along the walkway border.
3. After buying your outdoor electric lights from the store or an antique auction, add up each lamps listed wattage requirement to know what size of wire or cable to buy. This information is listed on the lamps.
4. After adding up the wattage from all of your outdoor electric lights, if you are over 200 watts you will need to buy 12-gauge wire cable to string your lights with. If your wattage count is under 200 watts, it is fine to save a little money and buy 14-gauge wire cable if you would like to do that. Place a note into your homeowner file explaining that you are on 14-gauge wire cable for future owners so that they know their cable limits.
5. Measure your cable line along your pathway up to and touching your house where you’d like your transformer to be located. Add Ã?½ of this figure again and that is how much cable that you need to buy. Just walk up to the counter in the hardware store and tell them what you need. This is the quickest way to shop in a hardware store for items that you have never purchased before.
NOTE: Your transformer needs to hang at least 12″ above ground-level or higher if you are prone to snow-drifts in that area.
6. Take your total outdoor electric lights wattage number with you to the hardware store and ask the clerk to find you the right size of transformer.
7. Lay or stand your outdoor electric lights in the general area that they will be positioned in. Hang your transformer box on the wall according to package direction 12″ or more above ground-level. Attach the end of your wire cable to your transformer box according to package directions, or by twisting box wire to cable wire and capping with a wire nut.
8. Run your wire cable from the transformer box over to every outdoor electric light. At each light leave a little slack so that you have wire available to work with.
9. Dig a skinny and shallow trench along your wire cable line to bury your outdoor electric light cable into. It is fine to cover the cable with garden rocks or mulch instead, but it will not last as long this way.
10. If your transformer has been hard-wired into your electrical system, turn your electricity off at the breaker box before attaching your outdoor electric lights to the cable.
11. There are a few different ways that you can attach your outdoor electric lights to the cable wire. I cut the cable wire and attach to the light by twisting cable wire to lamp wire, both incoming and outgoing, and then covering these connections with plastic wire nuts.
12. Bury your cable and you are done installing your outdoor electric lights.
Finding ideas for outdoor electric lights is easily accomplished on eBay. By scanning their various offerings in outdoor electric lights you can become familiar with antique, reproduction, vintage, and all outdoor electric lighting new styles or trends that are available on the market today. After finding your ideal outdoor electric light choices on eBay, then shop around online and locally to see where the best bargains can be found.
What not to do with outdoor electric lights: Do not fill in your wire trench until you are sure that your lights are all working. Do not install antique outdoor electric lights without replacing their old lamp wires with safe new wire. Do not install expensive antique leaded glass outdoor electric lights any place where they will be hit by flying rocks from cars, or destroyed by a hail storm.
