LET’S CONNECT!
No, I don’t mean on the latest social media site — although that would be totallycool!
What I’m talking about today is making the important connections in an outdoor lighting system. Any outdoor lighting contractor, irrigator or landscaper could install the best quality lighting fixtures on the market today, but if they do a poor job of connecting the wiring, it’s a lighting system with a very short life span.
How can it be that a small, routine part of almost any electrical project can cause such catastrophic malfunction?
Think of the wiring in an outdoor lighting system as the arteries of your body. Your arteries carry the blood to every part of it, and if any of these arteries get blocked and blood can’t flow out from the heart, you know there will be a serious failure of some kind in the body. Now, the wiring for outdoor lighting is like the arteries in the system. The wires have to carry the electricity, like the blood, to every component in the system or something will fail to work.
The weakest points in this system are the connections. These connections, like the wires, are buried directly in the wet dirt. After all, even in a drought (like the one we have in Austin and central Texas right now), the landscape will be a wet environment – at least occasionally, as water is likely to be provided to plants and trees from time to time. In our experience in repairing and upgrading lighting systems, we have seen many causes for system breakdown: everything from wires simply twisted together and covered in electrical tape, to regular (not gel-filled) wire nuts with no covering.
Just think about that for a moment. Think back to your sixth grade science class – how well does electricity and water mix? What happens in the case of your lighting system here is that water seeps into the connection. At best, the wires corrode beyond help; and at worst, it causes a short circuit interrupting the flow of electricity causing a system, or partial system, FAILURE.
So, please – ask the question to make sure that the person you hire to design and install your outdoor lighting system uses a waterproof method of making their wire connections. If the wiring fails, we can’t just put in a stent to support the bad artery – you’ll need a complete by-pass for your outdoor lighting system. And that can be expensive surgery.
If you have a current lighting system that is not working properly, maybe we should have a look to see if the problem stems from the connections. Contact us to set up a service for your system.
