Customer Request for Garden Lighting
Hi, this is John Dale from GlobileNet. I’m just doing a review of another client. In this case, it was a client that needed a number of garden lights installed. He’d already purchased the garden lights. Subash called me and said “Look, can you give me quotes to finish things off, run the cables that are necessary, etc.”
Identifying Voltage Issues
When I had a visit with Subash and we had a pre-consulting client visit, he showed me the lights that he’d purchased, which were perfectly fine, by the way. The only problem was, some were 12 volts and some were 24 volts.
Voltage Compatibility and RGB Challenges
In this type of area, if you want to combine lights onto the same wires, then you need to have the same voltage characteristics. And also he had some RGB lights, the red, green, blue combination lights that he thought he could just put on the same cable.
Providing a Tailored Quote
Anyway, so I’d done an evaluation of what was required, and I sent a quote, as we would normally do, and I highlighted those areas which were perhaps problematic. And had some solutions which I’d suggested to him to really optimise and use everything that he’d purchased where we could. As a result, I added a few things as part of the quote where he was going to return some of the lights that were not suitable.
Garden Bed Conduit Limitations
On-site, we had an area where they’d run a a pretty small conduit under the garden bed, which meant that I’d have to design the circuitry so that I was cautious about how many wires to run. In the back of the garden, fortunately, there were no RGB lights; or rather, he wanted some, but we redeployed those RGB lights to the front because they required four wires, and we did monotone lights at the back pool area.
Installing Poolside Lighting
I’d run three garden cables that were capable of doing 40 watts per line because there were quite a few lights. One of those lights was strung underneath a pool ledge to light up one whole area of steps shining into the pool. Anyway, that all went very successfully, and Subhash was very happy with that.
Rewiring the Front Yard
Then we went to the frontyard that I had to rewire. There were some wires already installed, but not suitable for the RGB lights. We rewired that so that we had the necessary four wires for this particular application.
Attaching LED Strip Step Lights
We had to adhere the RGB step lights, which was one of those LED strips. In fact, there were 13 LED strips that had to attach to the bottom of the concrete because there was a ledge left over when they did the concreting and put all the tiles in. So it wasn’t exactly a clean area to install and it wasn’t easy to access.
Overcoming Installation Challenges
But I scrubbed the underside of that concrete and effectively used some special glues and adhesives to attach it under the 13 stairs. And then I joined all of those individual stair lights to a common cable and put it on the drivers that were supplied in the garage. So that was working well. He was happy with that one.
Installing Fence Line RGB Lighting
And then the other RGB lights went along the front garden fence line. And we’d managed to, again, put a couple of cables that were necessary to power those. And they were going to be on a separate driver. This is because, although they were 24 volts, they weren’t the same supplier. So they only had a three wire connection requirement.
Product Choice and Voltage Matching
When I buy these products, obviously, I buy them so that I know that we don’t have any mix up, because ideally, I would connect everything on the same voltage and the same number of wires rather than running other different wires all over the place just to accommodate the products.
Final Result and Customer Satisfaction
Anyway, it worked out really well. Some of the tricks used were in trying to get a very tight conduit with a lot of cables through, which we managed to do. We had to obviously have a good knowledge of what we were doing. The client has to also be accommodating, which Subash was. The end result was a fantastic display of lighting. Subash has had me back a couple of times since, doing fans in the house and other power points and things like that. He’s very happy.
