Exterior Lighting near you

Every outdoor fitting carries an ingress protection rating, written as two digits: the first for solid objects and dust, the second for water. The number that matters outdoors is the second one, and the honest question is not what the fitting is rated to but what it will actually be exposed to. A light under a deep verandah two metres from the edge sees very little water. The same fitting on an exposed western wall in a summer storm sees water driven horizontally, and a rating chosen for the sheltered case will not hold.

Corrosion is the quieter killer and it is worse in Australia than most people expect. Salt-laden air reaches well inland on the prevailing wind, and it attacks the fixings, the hinges and the terminations before it attacks anything you can see. Within a few kilometres of surf, mild steel brackets and ordinary fasteners will fail long before the lamp does, which is why marine-grade stainless or properly finished aluminium is not an upgrade on the coast but the baseline.

The third material question is serviceability. A sealed fitting with an integrated light source is replaced as a unit when it fails; a fitting with a replaceable lamp and a gasket you can buy again is repaired. Ask which one you are being quoted, because it changes what the fitting costs over ten years rather than on the day.

The complaint that reaches councils and mediation services is rarely about brightness in the abstract. It is about a light that shines into a bedroom, a sensor light that triggers all night on a cat or a moving branch, and a floodlight left on from dusk to dawn with nothing to illuminate. All three are aiming problems, not wattage problems, and all three are cheaper to prevent than to argue about.

There are two separate effects to control. Spill is light landing where you did not intend it, which is fixed by aiming the fitting downwards, by shielding it, and by choosing a fitting with a controlled beam rather than a bare source. Glare is the source itself being visible from where somebody stands, which is fixed by recessing, shielding or raising the fitting so the bright part is not in the line of sight. A light that illuminates your path well and cannot be seen directly from next door has solved both.

The practical test is to walk the boundary at night once the lights are installed, and to stand where a neighbour stands: at their back door, at their windows, at the footpath. If the fitting is uncomfortable to look at from there, it will be uncomfortable every night. Ask the electrician to include that walk-through in the job rather than leaving at dusk.

Fixed outdoor lighting is licensed electrical work, and the reason is in the description: fixed wiring, penetrations through the building fabric, and equipment sitting in a wet location where a fault has somewhere to go. Energy Safe Victoria's campaign against homeowner electrical work puts it without qualification, that unqualified electrical work is illegal as well as extremely dangerous, and swapping a fitting that is already on the wall is not an exception to it.

You should end up with a compliance document, and outdoor fittings are the first things any future inspection will look at, so it is worth keeping. In New South Wales it is the Certificate of Compliance for Electrical Work that the electrician lodges with the regulator. Ask what your own state produces and file it with the fitting's own paperwork, because the rating of the fitting and the certificate for the circuit are two halves of the same answer.

Where a fitting is mounted on a heritage-listed facade, on common property in a strata scheme, or in a location controlled by a planning permit or a covenant, there may be approvals beyond the electrical ones. Ask the council or the owners corporation before the bracket goes on the wall, not after.

Summer is the season that tests the hardware. Direct sun on a fitting all afternoon, then a thermal shock when a storm arrives, is the cycle that finds every failed gasket and every fixing that was not up to the location. It is also the season of insects: anything with a lens and a warm housing collects moths, spiders and the webs that follow them, which dim the output and block sensors long before anyone notices.

Winter is when the lighting is actually used, because the dark arrives while everyone is still moving around. The failures people discover in June are almost always the ones that happened quietly in January, which is a good argument for checking outdoor lighting at the end of summer rather than at the start of winter.

Storm season is the third consideration. Water gets into fittings through the top, not the bottom, and it gets in where a cable enters a housing that was mounted at the wrong angle. After any severe storm, look for fittings that have fogged internally, for lenses holding water and for brackets that have moved, and treat a light that trips a safety switch in wet weather as a fault to report rather than a quirk.