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
Malibu Landscape Lighting Kits
Posted by Landscaper | Filed under landscape lighting kits
In the landscape lighting world, much like any other commercial technology, you have your high-end, your low end and everything in between. In the not so distant past, enjoying a well-lit landscape was reserved for those with more substantial means. Not necessarily just for the rich, mind you, but your average blue collar worker was left pretty much in the dark (pardon the pun).
The two elements keeping the rest of us out were cost and installation. Actually, cost was a two-parter in its own right. Not only were the lights expensive, but installation wasn’t something your average Joe or Jane could readily tackle as earlier landscape lighting options were relatively dangerous electrical things to install. So purchasing the lights was prohibitive and paying a professional electrician to do the work placed the option outside many people’s range. But then came Malibu.
I’m not talking about everybody’s favorite Baywatch destination, I’m talking about the landscape lighting company (and others like it) famous for making landscape lighting accessible to the rest of us through the production of low-cost, safe, low-voltage, easy to install landscape lighting kits. If you’ve spent any time in a hardware store looking for a reasonably priced landscape lighting option, you’ve probably seen their products.
Now I do want to clear one thing up right from the start and that’s to point out that Malibu doesn’t just make inexpensive landscape lighting kits. They are a premier maker of high end landscape lighting as well. But that’s for another post down the road. For now, recognize that if you’re in the market for super affordability, Malibu is the way to go. Don’t believe me?
The LX10610T25 Malibu outdoor landscape lighting kit featured in the image above is just one example of how accessible Malibu has made things to the budget-conscious consumer. This kit contains 10 low-volt tier lights, a 44-watt power pack and a 50 foot cable. How much would you pay for all that? Well if this weren’t a kit, probably hundreds. As it is a kit, I’m looking at it on Amazon for only $27.00.
Other kits by Malibu include the Intermatic LX19610T25 Malibu Outdoor Tier Light/Floodlight Kit with Six One-Light Tier Lights, Four One-Light Floodlights and 44-Watt Power Pack
For those of you with bigger ambitions or larger property to cover, Amazon also sells the Intermatic LX19720T Malibu Outdoor Lighting Kit with Fourteen Tier Lights, Six Floodlights plus 88-Watt Power Pack/Timer, Black
I won’t rehash it all here, but there are some sacrifices you make buying an affordable landscape lighting kit in terms of brightness. You can read my extensive post covering the pros and cons of plastic landscape lighting kits for more details but, in a nutshell, the lower melting point of plastic limits the wattage of the bulbs. The good news is that Malibu also offers metal landscape lighting kits which, while pricier than the plastic models, are relatively affordable compared to what you might pay buying lights individually. The kit pictured below, the Malibu LT13976T Low Voltage Garden Light Kit with Four 7-Watt Metal Tier Lights and Two 20-Watt Metal Floodlights, Black
Don’t Give Up on Plastic Landscape Lighting Kits
But there are also tremendous upsides to plastic kits. Not only are landscape lighting kits such as those sold by Malibu inexpensive to purchase, they are also inexpensive to replace. If a light breaks due to a careless maneuver with a lawnmower, for example, replacing that light will be dirt cheap. Plastic also weathers well, is surprisingly durable and virtually indistinguishable from metal at night. But all those things aside, my big passion for Malibu landscape lighting kits and for the company in general is that their products are super easy to install.
As stated in the product descriptions above, Malibu kits (and non kits) utilize a power pack that converts the 120-watts your outlet provides down to a safe wattage appropriate for your lights. What’s safe? Well, that depends on the number of lights you’re running and their wattage. Say you have eight 10-watt lights. An 88-watt power supply will cover you. Just multiply the wattage of the lights by the number of lights you’ll be using and get a power pack providing a little more juice. The good news is that you don’t even have to bother with the math if you’re installing a kit as the kit comes with an appropriately powerful power pack included!
Hooking the cable that will feed power to the lights up to the power pack is also insanely simple. If you can use a screwdriver, you can do this. The power pack then plugs into your outlet just like any electric tool or appliance and you then run the cable in the pattern you’ll be placing your lights. But the fun doesn’t end there. The next step is attaching the lights to the cable.
Now in the olden days of yore, hooking a light to a cable for outdoor use was a labor that could require waterproof conduit, wire strippers and a fair bit of electrical know-how. Malibu has turned this all into an extremely easy affair a half-stoned monkey with epilepsy could probably pull off. Attaching the lights to the power-feeding cable uses a method I’m familiar with from working with networks back in the primitive days. Rather than cutting and splicing a cable (which effectively reduces its carrying capacity each time it’s done) we could use what was known as a vampire tap to connect a branching run.
To put this into terms you non-network types can understand, basically, a short cable comes from the light and clamps onto the main power cable anywhere you find convenient. The clamp has a metal “tooth” that pierces the outer insulation to contact the copper cable inside. Once clamped, simply screw it into place and you’re done. I can’t over emphasize how simple it is. Again, if you can use a screwdriver, you can do this all yourself.
So I realized I’m going on and on with another rambling post here. I guess I should wrap things up and summarize. Malibu specializes in outdoor lighting and offers fantastic, high-end lights. But, they’ve also made landscape lighting affordable and doable for those on a budget with low-cost, low-voltage, easy-to-install landscape lighting kits. Just know what you are getting before you buy. Sorry for the self promotion but definitely read my earlier post on the upside and downside of landscape lighting kits before you make your purchase. If, after reading that post, you still feel that a kit is the perfect solution for you, you simply can’t go wrong for the price.
Tags: landscape lighting, landscape lighting kit, landscape lighting kits, Malibu, malibu landscape lighting, malibu landscape lighting kits, outdoor landscape lighting, outdoor landscape lighting kits
