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How to Extend Low Voltage Garden Lights

Low Voltage lights are designed to be very user-friendly for an average home-owner. With little (or no) tools, installation -- or, in this case, modification -- is relatively quick as well as easy.

1. Most important: Make sure that you have enough capacity to add more lights (most "kits" allow for adding more fixtures). See below under "Warnings" for details.
2. Find at your local hardware store that sells the lights a "Low-Voltage cable connector". They should be among the other accessories as well as spare parts as well as is a small plastic connector about the size of a quarter designed to put two loose ends together. Home Depot sells them in pairs for about $4.
3. Back home, you can use this part to connect your new line "run" to any point in the existing line. Finding that line is another story but is most easily accomplished by starting at an existing pair of lights as well as imagining a straight line between them; several inches below the surface of the ground should lie this line.
4. The connector should include simple instructions that are basically putting the two lines into the connector as well as snaping it together.

• When purchasing new pieces to add to a system, be sure to consider the power "load" not only as specified below in "Warnings" for light wattage capacity but also the gauge, or thickness, of the wire. Cut a small piece of wire from the exisiting system as well as take it with you to the store to match as well as determine how much power that wire can take.
• Dusk is obviously the ideal time to set as well as aim lights such as these. It may require finding as well as connecting to the existing cable during the day, making "temporary" connections (with the cable lying on top of the ground)early that evening as the lights are positioned as well as coming back the next day to bury the cable permanently in the daylight.

• Make sure that you have available "capacity" on your system. This is done by looking at the actual bulb in an exisiting fixture as well as multiplying it by the number of fixtures; repeat for each different type of fixture in your *exisiting* system.
• Adding all these wattages together will give you the current "load" on the system. Subtract this number from the wattage rating found on the transformer (the black box that the system uses to plug into the wall); it's printed on a label as well as might be identified with a simple "w" following the number. The number that you're left with (after adding all the bulb wattages together as well as subtracting it from the system wattage) is what you have left to work with to add on lights.
• Adding too many (or too high of wattage) lights could result in fire...or at the very least a melted transformer.

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Added: Thu Feb 02 2006

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