Question about location of landscape lighting transformer

You may be surprised how well solar lights are for this type situation.


I have a ton of these and had good luck.

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Transformer should be in a weatherproof box. I wouldnt use and extension cord though. Get some pvc and bury it. Direct burial cable sucks for this.

ETA: most outdoor lighting low voltage transformers should come in an outdoor box is what I meant.

I wouldn't think you'd need a transformer involved for this. LED lights don't pull much amps and 100' isn't all that far. A 100'extension cord rated for 15 amps isn't very large.

Pretty sure you will be fine assuming you are using newer age LED spot lights. Put the transformer at your power source then run the LV wire in a small trench to your location.

I can build a housing if needed, I guess I’m more concerned with powering the transformer and voltage drop.

quote:

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this is over 100’ from the house and I don’t want to lose power in that long of a run

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Check out this voltage drop calculator.


You’ll need:
The number of fixtures
The wattage of each fixture


If you’re doing spotlights, check out Amazon and eBay for FXL RS uplights if you don’t have a specific one in mind already. Reason? Integrated LED is fine, and they’re generally great at being waterproof, but these are the pro lights from the halogen days. They’re well built and will last a long, long time. They will also allow you to rewire a new receptacle if the old one goes bad. They’ll use mr16 bipin bulbs, and you can find them on Amazon in most colors of white, and then your particularly famous colors (I have red, green, gold, purple and then warm and cool white). Integrated LED fixtures will eventually die, and then they’re dead.
My bulbs are 7w. They have some higher and some lower wattage ones. On this calculator, you need to add all the watts for all the bulbs/fixtures you plan on using.
The calculator will show you:
1) your max run on wire from 8 through 18 gauge
2) the difference between 12-15v taps (incrementally).
Many “nicer” transformers will allow you to go “up” in voltage (to 13, 14, or 15) to help with the problem you describe.


A quick example:
70w (so 10x 7w fixtures) running on 12g wire at 12v means your max run will be ~144ft. Jump up to 15v, and you can roughly double the distance.


LED lamps are very forgiving compared to halogen in terms of voltage. There are caveats (fixtures that are close vs far if evenly spaced, but that doesn’t sound like your scenario), you generally want to run in a “T” or a “loop” instead of a straight line if possible.


So to not answer your question, why not just look closely at the feasibility of putting the transformer relatively close and running LV wire out to your oaks? Seems way safer and very likely to work than burying an extension cord and having a transformer out away from the house. It should be safe/fine in the elements, but I would just make sure I needed to do that before I ran a 110v (which I would probably do according to local code, in the appropriate conduit rather than burying an extension cord directly) which would probably wind up being more expensive to do “right”

You need a multi tap transformer. Allows you to up the voltage coming out of the transformer to compensate for voltage drop.


General overview…

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