Saturday, May 29, 2010

Exterior Lights

As you can tell from the images, the electrician wired the outside ground lights. For fun, I turned everything on inside the house and lit the exterior ones as well. It is striking for a photo, but a bit overkill for normal use. Once we occupy the house, it won't look this lit-up - as there will be shades to cover some windows and all the lights won't be on all at once.

The exterior lights serve a couple purposes - to light the house for special occasions and to also provide security illumination around the house. We are able to turn them on from a few places within the house - including the upstairs.

As the landscaping gets placed, I may move some of the ground lights away from the house a bit. They are LED and use very little electricity relative to the wattage they put out. Their color is very true. The electrician told me that there is about 18" of extra wire to make adjustments. Right now, the two on either side of the Japanese Maple are just a bit too close.

The ground lights have 6 very small LED lamps within each fixture. There were similar ones with only 3 or 4. I researched these as best I could but couldn't find any lit examples of the ones I selected. The catalog was written for electrical engineers but with some help, I was able to understand most of it.

Atlantic Electric (the store that I bought them from) had them installed outside their store and told me to come by at night to look at them. However, each time I went by at night, they were never turned on. With nothing to serve as a real-life example, I just crossed my fingers that the light levels would be what I hoped for.

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