Landscape Lighting near you

Before anything is dug, the existing services have to be found. Australian residential blocks contain water, sewer, gas, telecommunications, irrigation and often an underground electrical supply, and none of them are where a homeowner assumes. A proper job starts with obtaining information about the underground assets on and around the property and then locating them on site, because a spade through a service is expensive at best and lethal at worst.

The cable itself should be in conduit, at a depth that survives normal garden work, on a route that runs along edges and hard landscaping rather than diagonally across a bed that will be dug next spring. Draw wires left in the conduit, and a spare conduit to the far end of the garden, cost very little at the time and save the whole job being re-dug when you add a fitting later.

Record the route. A photograph of every open trench, taken before it is backfilled and with a fixed reference such as a fence or a corner of the house in the frame, is the most valuable document produced on the day. Give a copy to whoever maintains the garden, and keep one with the electrical certificate.

The confusion around garden lighting comes from the transformer. Downstream of it the fittings run at extra-low voltage, and plug-in kits are sold on that basis. Upstream of it is fixed wiring at mains voltage, and connecting a transformer to the installation, adding an outdoor powerpoint to feed it, running a supply into the garden, adding a circuit or doing anything at the switchboard is licensed electrical work.

New South Wales states the rule in a form that leaves no room for the garden exception people imagine: an electrical licence or certificate is required before any electrical wiring work, regardless of the cost of the work and regardless of whether the property is residential, commercial or industrial. A weekend spent burying cable for a transformer somebody else will connect later is still a person doing part of an electrical installation. The sensible sequence is to have the electrician specify the route and the protection before anything is dug, rather than after.

The other approvals to check are local. Lighting within a pool barrier zone, lighting on common property in a strata scheme, and lighting on a property covered by a heritage listing or a planning permit can all carry conditions beyond the electrical ones. Ask the council and, where relevant, the owners corporation before the trench is opened.

Artificial light at night changes behaviour in animals that evolved without it. Nocturnal mammals avoid lit ground and lose foraging range, insects are drawn to fittings and die at them, birds are disturbed in roosting trees, and on parts of the Australian coast light visible from a beach disorients nesting turtles and hatchlings. A garden scheme is a small contributor on its own and a large one in aggregate, which is the argument for designing it deliberately rather than by default.

Three decisions do most of the work. Aim fittings downwards or shield them so the source is not visible from outside your property or from the beach. Use fewer, better-placed fittings rather than many weak ones, because the eye adapts and a dark garden needs very little light to read. And put the whole scheme on a timer that switches it off when the household has gone to bed, since garden lighting that runs until dawn is illuminating nothing anybody is looking at.

The same three decisions solve the neighbour problem, which is the other common complaint. An uplight into a tree that also floods a bedroom window next door is a badly aimed uplight, not an unreasonable neighbour, and the fix is a shield and a fifteen-degree change of angle.

The annual job here is realignment rather than repair. Australian gardens put on growth quickly through a wet summer, mulch creeps up the bodies of the fittings after every top-up, and foliage comes to rest against lenses that run warm. Book the walk-around for a night in autumn, take a torch and a screwdriver, and treat every fitting as something to be adjusted rather than something that was set once.

The other annual jobs are cleaning and inspection. Lenses covered in dust, soil splash and webs lose far more output than people expect, and spiders nest in the warm recess of almost every garden fitting. While cleaning, look for cable that has worked its way to the surface, for fittings that have tilted or sunk, and for corrosion at the gland where the cable enters.

If any part of the scheme trips a safety switch, if a fitting shows internal moisture, or if cable has been damaged by digging, stop using that circuit and call a licensed electrician. Damaged buried cable is not a homeowner repair, even on a low-voltage run, because what fails is usually the mains-side supply feeding the transformer.

Summer storms are the stress test. Water pools in beds, mulch moves, and fittings that sat proud in autumn end up half-buried. It is also when the garden is used most at night, so a check of the scheme in early summer is the one that earns its keep. If the garden includes a pool, everything within and around the barrier has extra constraints and should be reviewed by the electrician rather than adjusted by hand.

Autumn is the right time for the annual service, after the growth surge and before the evenings shorten. Winter is when a garden scheme is on for the longest hours in the southern states, which is also when a timer setting chosen in January turns out to be wrong.

In bushfire-prone areas, treat the annual clean as part of the wider clearing work: leaf litter packed around a warm fitting in a garden bed is fuel in exactly the place you least want it. Ask the electrician which fittings in your scheme run warm and keep those areas clear.