Planning to Install Your Malibu Landscape Lighting Kit
Posted by Landscaper | Filed under Installation Guides, Landscape Lighting Advice, landscape lighting kits
Ok, so it’s time to continue our story. Actually, forget about the story. You had enough of that in the last post leading up to this one in which I introduced my devious friends and the sneaky way in which they lured this poor, unsuspecting blogger into installing landscape lighting in their garden. Read that post by clicking here if you’d like to know how easy it is to pull the wool over my eyes.
Today’s article, though, represents what you need to get started installing Malibu landscape lighting kits. It is specific to the Malibu 8 pack metal landscape lighting kit, but it will serve you for just about any Malibu landscape lighting kit. Now that I think about it, though, a bit more of the story needs telling to bring us up to speed. I’ll try to be quick about it.
As I mentioned, Rick and Eryn live in a townhouse so their garden is modest in size. It’s something around 25′ x 25′ with planting beds surrounding a brick patio on most sides and a small pond and waterfall in one corner. Shading the entire setting is a tree near the brick wall of the garden. The tree is nothing spectacular; I don’t even know the species, but it does have interesting branches and bark texture.
Though Eryn has a healthy green thumb, their dog, Chloe, has done a heck of a number on the soil in most of the garden. Suffice to say that not much grows in several sections. They’ve gotten around that by relying heavily on potted plants. Aside from that, the garden’s east and west sides are flanked with wooden privacy fences supporting a few mounted planters. And with that in mind you have an idea of the garden layout.
As Rick and I drove to his local Home Depot, he was already engaging in the most common mistake beginners make as they plan landscape lighting. He was hell bent on overdoing it. Without me along, the guy would have happily settled on three or four times more illumination than he needed. I reminded him that less was more. When that didn’t suffice, I suggested he just buy a massive halogen porch light and saturate the whole yard in excess illumination. Cheaper and more appropriate for the task, I told him. Fortunately the price of the landscape lighting kits did all the arguing for me.
I’d convinced Rick to go with metal lights. As I’ve mentioned here before, plastic landscape lighting kits are definitely less expensive. Unfortunately they are also dimmer due to the fact that plastic melts easily so the brilliance of the bulbs they can handle must be dimmer. Brighter bulbs equate to greater heat. In our walk-through of the garden before we left I’d told Rick I wanted to incorporate spotlights into the plan to up-light the interesting tree and some potted palms. To do so, we’d need a higher wattage bulb and that meant going with metal lights.
So, I’d done a good job of talking up the value of up-lighting and the consequential requirements for metal landscape lights. Of course, metal lights cost more and that cost limited Rick’s enthusiasm nicely. We settled on an 8 piece light kit that met all of our criteria and would even allow for a little expansion if required. And that, my friends, is where we transition from story to instruction.
How to Plan for Installing a Malibu Landscape Lighting Kit
Let me start by telling you that installing this kit is easy as pie. It doesn’t matter if you’re completely new to this kind of thing. What does matter is that you have an outlet outdoors. This is called a GFCI or ground fault circuit interrupter. To you uninitiated out there, it’ll look much like any old outlet. If you don’t have an outlet outside you’ll need an electrician to install one. Otherwise, all you’ll need for the work ahead is a screwdriver, a hand shovel to loosen dirt and an hour or two of spare time. Oh, and you’ll want to decide ahead of time if you want to go through the hassle of burying the low-voltage cable or just cover it with mulch. The latter is obviously the easier choice.
The kit I helped Rick pick is the Malibu 8301-9907-08 8 Piece Metal Tier Light Kit. Don’t let the title mislead you because it contains more than just tier lights. It contains 6 tier lights but also 2 spotlights. Also included in the kit is a 150 watt power pack and 75′ of cable.
Now the first thing you should do when purchasing a low voltage landscape lighting kit is to ensure that the included cable length is adequate for your needs. In our case, 75′ was more than ample. We’d measured our needs at about 40 feet but estimated another 10 to 15 feet thanks to twists and turns. We’d have plenty cable left over.
What size power pack do I need for my Malibu landscaping lights
The second thing you should do is ensure the power pack included in your kit is adequate for your needs. This seems one of the more common questions home owners ask as they consider how they can change up their layout. Whether they want to add some more creative lighting with spotlights or simply extend some lights down a path, they either don’t know that their power pack’s wattage is an important factor or they don’t know how to calculate how many lights they can get away with.
Fortunately it isn’t hard to figure out. All you need to do is add up the wattage of your lights and ensure your power pack provides more wattage. For example, the 8 pack kit Rick purchased includes a 150 watt power pack (also called a transformer). The 6 tier lights are 7 watts each for a total of 42 watts. The two spotlights are 20 watts each for a total of 40 watts. Add the two together and you get 82 watts. The 150 watt transformer is more than adequate and will allow Rick to add in additional lights if he wants to do so down the road.
The final thing you want to do is make sure you know how you want your end results to look. This can actually be the most difficult part of the whole endeavor. It requires more than just trying to decide where your lights will be planted but also how you want to illuminate features. As I mentioned, Rick has some ornamental palms and a tree with some interesting features that I felt could be exploited in the lighting layout for some great results.
As you look around your garden, take note of plants that would cast dramatic shadows if lit by a spotlight. Look at the background on which those shadows will be cast. Examine trees that might do well being lit from below or statuary to which you’d like to call attention. Also take into account boundaries and borders that represent tripping hazards. Remember that those tier lights can do more than just outline paths and borders for safety. They can also help planting beds “pop” at night.
Ok, I’m past my second page of typed text so I think I’ll wrap it up. I want the actual instruction element to stand on its own rather than be buried at the end of a long story. For now you have a good understanding of what you need to get started and what planning you should do before you head off to the store. Check back soon for the full landscape lighting kit installation instructions.
Tags: landscape lighting, landscape lighting kit, Malibu, power pack, transformer
Friends, Fish and Landscape Lighting
Posted by Landscaper | Filed under landscape lighting kits
My last post on the practical side of landscape lighting – driveway lighting – felt a bit dry. I get it. Lights serve mostly to keep us from bumping our shins on stuff at night. But I’m an artistic soul and refuse to see landscape lights as simply a practical means to prevent accidents. Yes, my wife will be happier if I don’t back over her flowers. Yes, guests will find their way up my driveway easier. But, dammit, I want beauty!
Fortunately today gives me the opportunity to write about both practical and aesthetic elements of garden lighting because I just finished installing some lights at my friend’s house over the weekend and I loved the finished product. First a little background.
Rick is my wife’s friend from childhood. He’s since become one of my best pals. His wife, Eryn, is also my dear friend. Truth told, my wife has more in common with Rick (sharing his love of sports and animals) and I have more in common with Eryn (sharing a strong creative gene and a matched talent for delivering deadpan humor). Get the four of us together and we’re like a deck of cards; constantly shuffling between each other as our conversations meander.
But I digress from my intended point which is that Rick and I are constantly bartering debt. Not monetary debt, mind you, but obligatory debt. I’ll remind him he owes me a favor since I helped him move into the home he and his wife share only to have him remind me of the hours he spent helping me install my brick patio. I’ll remind him about the time I picked him up from a bar downtown at 3 in the morning after he locked his keys in his car, he’ll remind me that he once rushed me to the hospital after a baseball nailed me in the head. Round and round our debt cycle goes and, wouldn’t you know it, I came up due this weekend.
My wife and I received a call from Eryn Wednesday evening. My wife spent the first 30 minutes chatting and catching up before handing me the phone for another hour of chatting. As I grilled Eryn on her latest writing project I could hear Rick in the background repeatedly asking her to ask me something. She eventually got to it and asked me if my wife and I had any weekend plans. I told her we had nothing on our plate. She invited Kathleen and I up to their house for the weekend.
Ordinarily Kathleen and I would jump at the opportunity to spend time with our friends but I hesitated before responding. I’ve just started a new job, you see. It’s the kind of job where the very success of an entire contract depends on the skills I’m bringing to the table and that’s a tremendous amount of pressure. I was really looking forward to a relaxing weekend doing nothing more than kicking back and working on my recently neglected love affair with the big screen TV in my den.
Eryn could sense my hesitation and knew just what to do to convince me to come. “I’ll make margaritas…” She dangled the offer like a carrot. I told her that sounded nice but she could hear the hesitation in my voice so she upped the ante, “ and Rick will grill dinner…” Sold! Rick is an incredible cook.
The truth is that I would have likely caved even without the meal and drinks as bait. Mind you, I rarely drink but their company always mellows me enough to do so. We love Rick and Eryn and it’s those late night conversations over drinks we share with them that help recharge our batteries and make these trips worth taking. The food… well that’s just a bonus. What I didn’t realize was that I’d just been suckered.
Little did I know that Rick had other plans in mind. Sure, there would be food on the grill. Yes, there would be ice cold drinks. But what Kathleen and I didn’t realize was that we’d be working hard for every bit of it this weekend. See, a debt was coming due and Rick had his mind on landscape lighting.
In fact, when we pulled up to the house a couple hours before dusk Friday night, Eryn was in the backyard of their humble town house gardening. Rick met us at the door and promptly took us out back to say hello. In just a matter of minutes my wife was elbow deep in potting soil and mulch, helping Eryn wrap up the tropical getaway look they were going for. I, super smart guy that I am, managed to escape immediate labor by asking Rick if he had a beer.
As the ladies worked on the finishing touches in the garden, Rick and I sipped beers and caught up on the goings on in our lives. The ladies interrupted an hour later, driven from the garden by the setting sun. The interruption lasted only long enough to dispense sweaty hugs before both girls adjourned to shower and change. Separately, folks. This was a G-rated weekend.
While they primped, Rick and I prepared the grill, steaks and potatoes. As we worked, the conversation turned to my blogging efforts. I maintain several blogs related to my hobbies and interests and Rick has even contributed content to one of them. “What about your landcape lighting blog,” he asked, “you still doing that one?”
I told Rick that, while the blog was still there, I hadn’t done much with it lately. Other than backing over my wife’s flowers, there wasn’t much in my personal life to write about. “It was a long winter,” I reminded him, “and we still have to restore the yard from all that snow.” I went on to tell him I’d be writing some less personal stuff for the blog soon; product reviews and the like.
I should have caught on when he responded with a simple grunt. There was something hidden in that monosyllabic sound; the promise of content soon to come. That hidden promise was delivered in what I suspect was a well rehearsed act put on by our hosts the following morning over breakfast. It went something like this -
Rick: Hey, Honey, did you know that Dave hasn’t been keeping up on his landscaping blog?
Eryn: Really? That’s too bad, Dave. Has the muse left you?
Me: No, I’m writing plenty on my other blogs but I…
Rick interrupting: He just hasn’t had much content to add lately. Weren’t we just talking about adding some landscaping lights to the backyard. Maybe we can get some work out of him while he’s here.
Eryn: Oh, Dave, would you? I want my garden to look like yours!
That last was delivered with much batting of eyelids, a pout and a flirtatious touch on my arm. It could have only been more classically staged and ripe with girlish manipulation if she had immediately followed the touch on the arm by asking me if I’d been working out. My wife snickering behind her hand made it all too clear that I’d been played like a virgin Vegas tourist. I turned a steely gaze on Rick and expressed my enthusiasm, “you tricky bastard. You’re cooking me swordfish for dinner tonight.”
While my wife and Eryn headed out to do some shopping – and to pick up my swordfish steak for grilling that night – Rick and I jumped in his Jeep for the short drive to Home Depot for a light kit. As much as I’d like to hold it against him for making me work on a weekend, the truth is that he did provide me landscape lighting material.
But I’ve spent enough time on the background to this story that I think I’ll wrap things up here for now and will get to the heart of the matter over the next few days. It has proven to be a busy week at work so far and don’t expect that to slow down anytime soon so I won’t make any promises on timing. But, I do promise that the follow-up to this post will be a complete guide to installing an 8 piece, metal, Malibu landscape lighting kit. There are pictures and plenty tips on creativity to share.
Given the small size of Rick’s yard, the results were pretty darn impressive. He’s thrilled, Eryn loves me and I have material to share. I guess it was worth the effort. Oh, and the swordfish was amazing! Check back soon for the guide!
Tags: landscape lighting, landscape lighting kit, landscape lights, lights, malibu landscape lighting kit
