Outdoor lighting
Outdoor circuits live in weather, and outdoor lighting fails in ways indoor lighting does not — water in a fitting, a corroded connection, a GFCI that trips every time it rains.
What we install
Positioning and control decide whether it is useful. Weather rating decides whether it lasts.
The most-requested outdoor work, and the easiest to get wrong. Light aimed at where people walk is useful; light aimed outward into the eyes is worse than none, because it destroys night vision and creates deep shadow behind it. Motion sensing needs positioning to catch approach rather than every passing car, and cheap sensors on a busy street produce a light that is on all night and ignored by everybody.
Usually a low-voltage system: a transformer fed from a weather-rated outdoor circuit, with runs out to fittings. The transformer's location and capacity, and the length of the runs, are what determine whether the far end of the system is as bright as the near end. Cable buried at a sensible depth and routed where a spade is not going to find it is the difference between a system that lasts and one that gets cut by the next bit of gardening.
Replacing a dated or leaking porch light is small work, with one thing worth checking while it is down: whether water has been getting into the box behind it. A fitting that has been letting water in for years is often sitting on a corroded connection, and the corrosion is the actual problem rather than the fixture.
Outdoor receptacles need ground-fault protection and a cover rated to keep water out while something is plugged in — not simply a flap that closes when empty. Older outdoor outlets frequently have the wrong cover, no GFCI protection, or both, and they are the outlets most likely to be sitting in a box with water in it.
Outdoor lighting is much better with deliberate control: a timer or photocell for dusk-to-dawn, separate zones so the path is not tied to the flood light, and a switch somewhere useful rather than only at the far end of the house. Deciding this at the start costs nothing; retrofitting it means going back into the same runs.
Seasonal displays draw more than people expect and usually end up on whatever outlet is nearest, which is how an extension cord becomes permanent. A properly rated exterior circuit with a switch inside, sized for the load and protected correctly, removes the annual improvisation.
Why outdoor work fails
Not the fixtures. The joints, the covers and the boxes behind them.
Indoor wiring lives in a stable, dry environment. Outdoor wiring goes through heat, freeze, hail and wind-driven rain, and every one of those cycles works at seals and joints. So the failures are predictable: water in a box behind a porch light, corrosion on a connection that has been damp for years, a splice made with tape rather than in a listed enclosure, an outdoor outlet with a cover that only seals when there is nothing plugged into it.
This is also why a recurring GFCI trip on an outdoor circuit is worth taking as information rather than as an annoyance. The device is reporting a leak to ground, and outdoors is exactly where that leak matters most.
Useful to include: what you want lit and why — security, a path, a patio, the front of the house — whether there is already an outdoor outlet or circuit, and whether anything currently trips when it rains.
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Because it is very probably right. A GFCI trips when current is leaking to ground, and rain reaching a fitting, a box or a connection produces exactly that. The fault is the water ingress, not the device, so the fix is finding where the water is getting in — a failed gasket, a cover that does not close properly, a fitting mounted so it collects water, or a buried splice that was never made in a listed enclosure. Replacing the GFCI with a standard outlet removes the protection while leaving the leak, on the circuit outdoors where shock risk is highest.
For paths, planting and general garden lighting, low-voltage is usually the sensible choice: the cable is easier to route, the fittings are small, and the system is straightforward to extend later. Line-voltage still makes sense for flood and security lighting, where the output needed is higher and the fitting is mounted on the building. Many houses end up with both, fed from the same weather-rated outdoor circuit.
Largely, and it depends where the fittings need to go. Anything mounted on the building — soffit, porch, flood, wall lights — usually needs no excavation at all. Path and planting lights need cable out to them, which is a narrow trench rather than an excavation, and can normally be routed along bed edges and under mulch rather than across lawn. Where a run has to cross a driveway or a patio, that is the constraint worth identifying before the layout is settled.
Not necessarily, but they do need a circuit with capacity for them and the right protection. What causes problems is loading outdoor lighting onto a circuit that is already near its limit, or feeding it from an indoor outlet through a cord run out through a window or a door. A dedicated exterior circuit is worth it where there is a real amount of lighting, a transformer, or seasonal load added on top.
That is mostly a question of what gets installed. Fittings and enclosures rated for wet locations, covers that seal with a plug in place, connections made in listed weatherproof enclosures rather than taped, and mounting that does not let a fitting sit in standing water are what determine whether a system survives. Hail, wind-driven rain and heat cycling all find the weak point eventually, and the weak point is almost always a connection rather than a fixture.
Tell us what you want lit and what is already out there, and we will work out the circuits and the control it needs.