When somebody spends a lot of money on a water feature, a cast stone fountain or a sheet waterfall coming off a block wall, it's usually the centerpiece of the yard during the day. Then the sun goes down and it turns into a sound coming from somewhere in the dark, and I get the call.

Water is one of my favorite things to light. It's also really easy to get wrong.

Light the water, not the structure

Most of the bad water feature lighting I see is an uplight stuck in the gravel a few feet away and aimed at the fountain, so you get a bright fountain and the water itself kind of disappears into the glare. What makes water look good at night is light coming through it or across it, so the falling water catches it and sparkles.

For a sheet waterfall or a water wall, that usually means a light strip or a small fixture tucked right under the lip where the water spills over, or set into the basin underneath and aimed back up at the sheet. Done right, the water looks like it's glowing from inside and you can't see where the light is coming from. For a tiered fountain I'll often put a small submersible fixture in the bowl aimed up through the falling water, and then maybe one soft light from outside to pick up the shape of the stone.

Ponds are their own thing. A light under still water mostly lights up whatever's floating in it, so I tend to light around a pond rather than in it, and let the surface reflect the plants and the sky.

Underwater fixtures have to be made for it

This sounds obvious but I've pulled plenty of regular landscape lights out of fountain basins where somebody figured waterproof was waterproof. A fixture rated for rain is not rated to sit underwater all day, and our water is so hard that a basin fixture needs to handle scale building up on it too. I use solid brass submersibles for this, for pretty much the same reasons I gave in the brass and copper post, and the lenses need wiping every so often because calcium crust dims them faster than you'd expect.

And everything in or near the water is low voltage, always. That's not really a preference.

Fire features are a different conversation

A fire pit or fire bowl makes its own light, and a lot of people want to light it anyway. Mostly I'd say don't, at least not directly. A bright light aimed at a fire bowl kills the whole reason you have one.

What I do is light around it, with low warm light on the seating and the walk out to it so people aren't tripping over chair legs on their way to the fire, and keep that on a dimmer or a separate zone so you can turn it way down once the fire's going. The fire should be the brightest thing in that part of the yard. If a gas fire bowl sits on a pedestal, a little grazing light on the column can look nice when the fire's off, but it should be a separate zone so it can go off when the fire is lit.

Heat matters here too. Fixtures need to be far enough away from the burner that they're not getting cooked, and the wire runs need to stay clear of where the gas line goes, which means coordinating with whoever installed the fire feature.

Pools and features together

A lot of yards in Scottsdale and Paradise Valley have a pool with sheer descents or scuppers coming off a raised wall, or a fire bowl sitting on the pool edge. Those get lit as part of the pool design, and I covered the basics of that in the pool lighting post. The big thing is that the pool light and the feature lights should match in color temperature, or at least look like they belong in the same yard. A cold blue-white pool light next to a warm scupper light looks like two different houses.

— Sam

Desert Outdoor Lighting has served the Phoenix Valley since 2004. We're licensed and bonded (ROC# 340142) and install landscape lighting and Gemstone permanent trim lighting in Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler, Scottsdale, Tempe, Queen Creek and across the Valley. Call (480) 809-7800 or request a free after-dark design visit.

The post How to Light Fountains, Water Walls and Fire Features appeared first on Desert Outdoor Lighting.

Here's a thing I explain a lot more than you'd think. People move here from somewhere else, they hear that Arizona doesn't do daylight saving time, and they figure that means they can set the lighting timer once and never think about it again. No springing forward, no falling back, done.

And then December shows up, they get home from work at 5:45, and the whole yard is sitting in the dark.

The clock stays put but the sun doesn't

Arizona skipping daylight saving means the clock on your microwave never jumps an hour. It doesn't do anything about the sun. In Phoenix the sun goes down around 7:40 in late June and somewhere around 5:20 in early December, so that's better than two hours of swing over the year, and it happens a few minutes at a time so nobody really notices until one evening it's just dark.

So if somebody set your timer in the summer to come on at 7:30, you've got a stretch every winter evening where it's been dark for two hours and your lights are still waiting for 7:30.

I go to a lot of houses in Chandler and Gilbert where this is exactly what's going on, and the homeowner thinks something is broken.

Winter is when you actually use the yard

This is what makes it kind of backwards out here. Back east, the dark early evenings come with snow and nobody's going outside anyway. Here, November through March is the good part of the year. It's 70 degrees at dinner time, people are firing up the fire pit and having friends over on the patio, and that's right when the lights are coming on two hours late.

So the season where you most need the yard lit after five is the season a fixed timer is most wrong.

The fix is not complicated

There are basically two ways to handle it, and the one I'd pick depends on what's already on your wall.

The first is a photocell, which is a little light sensor that turns the system on when it gets dark and doesn't care what time it is. They're cheap and they work, but they have to be mounted somewhere that actually sees the sky. I've found plenty of them tucked under an eave or behind a bush, or on the side of the house where the porch light hits them, so the lights either come on at 3 in the afternoon or never come on at all.

The second is an astronomical timer, and that's what I put on most systems now. You tell it where you are and it figures out sunrise and sunset for every day of the year by itself, and then you set it to come on at sunset and go off at whatever time you want, say 11 or midnight. Most of the Wi-Fi transformers and smart controllers have this built in, and I wrote a little about it in the post on lighting apps, because "on at sunset" turns out to be the setting people keep long after they've stopped playing with all the scenes.

If you've got one of the old dial timers with the little pins you push in, those can't do any of this. You'd have to go out every month or so and move the pins, and nobody does, so it's probably time to replace it anyway.

Permanent trim lights have the same problem

If you have Gemstone or any other permanent trim on the roofline, check the schedule in the app this time of year. It's the same deal. Set it to sunset instead of a clock time and you never have to think about it again, which matters more in November and December when the holiday scenes are going and you want the house lit when people are actually driving by after work.

If your lights have been coming on later and later and you thought something was going wrong with them, it's very likely just the timer. Go look at it tonight. If it's on a fixed clock time, either move it up to about 5:15 for the winter and remember to push it back in the spring, or switch to sunset if it can do that.

And if you've got one of the old pin timers screwed to the wall and you're tired of messing with it, we swap those out on service calls all the time, it's usually a pretty small job.

— Sam

Desert Outdoor Lighting has served the Phoenix Valley since 2004. We're licensed and bonded (ROC# 340142) and install landscape lighting and Gemstone permanent trim lighting in Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler, Scottsdale, Tempe, Queen Creek and across the Valley. Call (480) 809-7800 or request a free after-dark design visit.

The post Arizona Lighting Timers: Why Winter Throws Them Off appeared first on Desert Outdoor Lighting.

Every year somewhere around the middle of October my phone starts ringing with people who just got back from Minnesota or Washington or wherever they spend the summer, and the call usually starts with "so we got back last week and half the yard is dark." Sometimes all of it is. Once in a while it's the opposite and the lights have been running all day every day since May because the timer reset itself, which is its own kind of surprise when the power bill shows up.

So if you're a snowbird and you just got in, this one's for you. Most of it you can check yourself in about twenty minutes after the sun goes down.

What a summer here does to a system nobody's watching

Your lights sat through five months of 110 degree afternoons, a full monsoon season and probably a couple of dust storms, all without anybody walking the yard. I wrote about what monsoon season does to outdoor lighting back in June, and pretty much everything in that post happened to your yard too, except nobody was home to notice when it did.

And the landscaper was probably still coming every couple weeks the whole time, with a string trimmer.

Start with the transformer

Go find the gray or black box on the wall, usually on the side of the house or out by the garage. If the timer has a little screen, make sure it actually shows the right time. A lot of the older mechanical timers lose their place after a power blip, and summer storms here knock the power out for a second or two more often than people think, so a timer that was set perfectly in April might now think it's three in the morning at dinnertime.

If the transformer has a breaker or a reset button on it, check whether it tripped. If it has tripped and it trips again as soon as you reset it, leave it off and call somebody, because something on the line is shorted and resetting it over and over isn't going to fix that.

Walk it after dark

Wait until it’s fully dark and go walk the whole yard with a flashlight. Mostly you’re hunting for fixtures that are out or gone dim, though it’s worth checking the aim while you’re at it, since wind and landscapers knock uplights sideways constantly and the one that used to graze your palo verde may be pointed at the neighbor’s bedroom window by now.

One dead light by itself is usually just the lamp or a corroded connection at that fixture, but if four or five in a row went dark together the problem is somewhere back up the wire and you’ll want somebody to trace it.

I’d wipe the lenses off while you’re out there too. Summer leaves a film of dust on them you can’t really see in daylight, and I’ve had customers swear we put in brighter lamps when all I did was clean the glass.

The plants grew and you didn't

Okay, you probably didn't either, but your yard definitely did. Monsoon rain makes everything shoot up, so by October there are bushes that have swallowed path lights whole and a lantana that's sitting right on top of an uplight. Trim those back. A fixture buried in foliage cooks itself faster in the heat, and you're paying to light the inside of a shrub.

Check the critters too

Pack rats are the other thing I’d look for. They’ll chew low voltage wire, mostly right where it comes up out of the ground at a fixture, and a house that’s been quiet since May is about as good as it gets for them. If you find chewed insulation or a pile of sticks and junk wedged in behind the transformer, get it looked at before you turn everything back on and head north again in April.

If you're leaving again in April

A lot of my snowbird customers end up just having us out once in the fall, right after they get back, to go through the whole system and fix whatever summer broke. It's not glamorous work and it's honestly cheaper than letting a small problem sit there for another year.

The other thing I'd suggest is switching to a timer you can see from your phone. Then you can check from Minneapolis in July whether the lights are coming on at dusk, and if they stop, you hear about it in July instead of in October. That's the kind of thing I wrote about in the post on what people actually use their lighting app for, and for somebody who's gone half the year it's probably the most useful part of the whole app.

Welcome back, by the way. You picked a good time, October through April is the whole reason any of us live here.

— Sam

Desert Outdoor Lighting has served the Phoenix Valley since 2004. We're licensed and bonded (ROC# 340142) and install landscape lighting and Gemstone permanent trim lighting in Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler, Scottsdale, Tempe, Queen Creek and across the Valley. Call (480) 809-7800 or request a free after-dark design visit.

The post Snowbird Outdoor Lighting Checklist for Phoenix Homes appeared first on Desert Outdoor Lighting.

Usually we can. But it's a lot cheaper and easier if I hear about the project before it starts.

What happens to the lighting

Low-voltage wire gets buried, usually around six inches down, running from fixture to fixture and back to the transformer. That's plenty deep for normal life in a yard. It's nowhere near deep enough to survive a trencher putting in new drip lines or a skid steer scraping out an old lawn.

The crews mostly aren't being careless. They just don't know the wire's there, because nobody told them and you can't see it, and the first they find out is when the trencher catches it and yanks up ten feet of cable. Some landscapers are really good about asking first. Plenty of them aren't.

Know where your wires are

If we did your original install, call us and we can tell you where the runs go, or come out and flag them before the crew starts. If you inherited the system from whoever owned the house before you, there's a decent chance nobody knows where anything goes, and that's worth a quick visit to trace it first.

Either way walk your landscaper through it before they dig. Show them the transformer on the wall, point out the flags, and ask them to hand dig anywhere close to a line.

Pull the fixtures before demo starts

This is the one I push hardest. If a bed is getting torn out, it's much better for us to come out ahead of time and pull the fixtures from that area, with the wire coiled up and everything stashed in your garage until the new plants are in. Then we come back and set it all up for the new design.

Because your old lighting was aimed at your old yard. That queen palm got an uplight because it was the tallest thing in the bed, and if it's gone and a row of young palo verdes is going in instead, the fixture is now pointed at nothing. So re-aiming is part of the job no matter what.

New plants are small, too. A palo verde from the nursery might be eight feet tall on the day it goes in and twenty-five feet in ten years, so I light it for about where it'll be in a few years and then we adjust as it fills in.

Going from grass to gravel

A lot of the re-landscapes I'm seeing lately in Mesa and Gilbert are people ripping out the lawn and going desert, partly for the water bill and partly because they're tired of mowing in July. That's a big change for lighting and mostly a good one, since a lawn is flat and kind of boring to light and a desert yard full of boulders and agave and maybe a dry riverbed gives you a lot more to work with. If you're putting in a saguaro, I've got a whole post on how to light those without messing it up.

It's also when the old sprinkler heads come out, so it's a good time to move fixtures away from spots that used to get soaked every morning.

Sometimes I'd just start over

If your system is fifteen years old and still running halogen, with fixtures that are already corroded and wire that's been patched a few times, a re-landscape is honestly the best time to pull the whole thing out and put in something new. The yard's already torn up and the trenches are already open, and I'd rather put new LED fixtures on fresh wire than try to rescue hardware that's going to quit in two years anyway.

But if the system's in decent shape, reusing it saves you a good chunk of money, and most of what came out of the ground goes right back in.

— Sam

Desert Outdoor Lighting has served the Phoenix Valley since 2004. We're licensed and bonded (ROC# 340142) and install landscape lighting and Gemstone permanent trim lighting in Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler, Scottsdale, Tempe, Queen Creek and across the Valley. Call (480) 809-7800 or request a free after-dark design visit.

The post Redoing Your Yard? Call Me Before the Landscaper Shows Up appeared first on Desert Outdoor Lighting.

The walk out there is the real problem

The first thing I look at is the path. Say somebody's mother-in-law is staying in the casita, and every night after dinner she walks forty or fifty feet across the yard to get there over pavers or gravel, maybe down a step where the grade changes, holding her phone flashlight out in front of her. That walk is what I'd light before anything else. Some low path lights along it and a step light anywhere the ground drops would do most of the work, and then I'd want something at the casita door so she isn't fishing around for a key in the dark.

I wrote a post in July about how outdoor lighting gets more important as you get older, and honestly casitas are where that whole post lives, because it's a walk somebody makes every single night and a lot of the time that somebody is seventy-five.

Power is usually the first thing to figure out

Low-voltage lighting runs off a transformer and the transformer plugs into an outdoor outlet. Easy at the main house. Out at the casita it depends on how the building was wired and how far it sits from wherever the main transformer is going to be.

If it's a long way from the house I'll usually put a second transformer out at the casita rather than running wire all the way back, because low voltage loses strength over distance and the fixtures at the far end come out dimmer than the rest. A transformer out there solves that, and it also lets the casita lights run on their own schedule if the guests keep different hours than you do. If there's no outdoor outlet on the building at all, that's a small separate electrical job before we start.

Guest house or storage shed

If family or guests actually stay out there I'd light it like a small house, which usually means the entry and the walk plus maybe a soft wash on the front wall so it looks like somewhere you'd want to go from across the yard.

If it's where you keep the pool chemicals and the Christmas boxes, please don't. I've seen people spend real money making a storage shed glow like a boutique hotel, and then from the patio it's the brightest thing in the whole yard and it's a shed. One fixture by the door on a photocell is plenty.

Pool houses land somewhere in between. Most of them are really just a casita with a bathroom and a pile of wet towels, and I usually light the path from the pool to the door pretty well since people are walking it barefoot and dripping, and then keep the building itself on the quiet side so it doesn't compete with the pool.

Detached garages and workshops

With detached garages, you want the ability to see who's back there, and you want to not trip over the hose when you walk out to grab something at ten at night. We will light the approach and the door, and sometimes graze the wall that faces the house so the building doesn't turn into a dark block in the corner once the sun goes down.

If somebody actually works in there at night, the light at the door matters a lot more than anything on the walls.

A couple things people forget

The view from the house, for one. Whatever you light out there you're going to be looking at from the kitchen window or the back patio every evening, so I always check the design from inside, and sometimes that moves fixtures around.

And glare into the casita windows. If somebody's sleeping out there, an uplight aimed at the front wall can end up shining right through the bedroom blinds, which your guests will be too polite to mention and will absolutely remember.

— Sam

Desert Outdoor Lighting has served the Phoenix Valley since 2004. We're licensed and bonded (ROC# 340142) and install landscape lighting and Gemstone permanent trim lighting in Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler, Scottsdale, Tempe, Queen Creek and across the Valley. Call (480) 809-7800 or request a free after-dark design visit.

The post Lighting a Casita, Guest House or Detached Garage appeared first on Desert Outdoor Lighting.

We call it moonlighting. You mount a fixture high up in a tree and aim it down so the light comes through the branches and lands on the ground in this broken, dappled pattern, pretty much the way your yard looks on a bright full moon night. The first time a customer walks out to see it after dark there's usually a pause where nobody says anything, and I've learned to just let that happen.

What it does for a yard

Uplighting is for showing off one thing, the saguaro or the stone wall or the front of the house. Moonlighting doesn't really show off anything in particular. It lights an area, like the patio under a big mesquite or the walk out to the back gate, and it does it softly enough that you can see where you're going and still see stars over your head.

The shadows are what you're really paying for. Every branch throws one, and when a breeze comes through the tree they drift around on the ground a little, which is something I've never been able to get any other way.

Which trees work out here

You need a tree with real branch structure and a canopy the light can filter through. In the Valley that's mostly mesquite, palo verde and ironwood, plus some of the big ash and eucalyptus you find in older neighborhoods in Mesa and central Phoenix, and the occasional Aleppo pine that somebody let get huge. Mesquite is probably my favorite because the branches twist around so much that the shadows come out looking like lace.

Palms are the one everybody asks about, and they just don't work. A date palm or a Mexican fan palm has no branches, it's a trunk with a head on top, so there's nothing for the light to break up on the way down and you end up with a hard bright circle on the ground. Palms look great uplit, so leave them for that.

The tree has to be tall enough too. Under about fifteen feet the light doesn't have room to spread and it starts looking like a spotlight on a stage.

Getting a light up a tree without hurting it

This takes a crew and a tall ladder and on a big tree sometimes most of a morning. The fixtures usually end up somewhere between twenty and thirty feet up, tucked into a crotch or against the back side of a limb so you can't spot them from the patio, and the wire comes down the side of the trunk facing away from where people sit. We use mounts that can be loosened as the tree grows, and they get checked when we're out for maintenance, because a mount that fit perfectly three years ago can start biting into a limb if nobody pays attention to it.

Aiming is the slow part. I do it at night with somebody standing on the ground telling me what they see, because from up in the canopy I can't tell how the shadows are landing and moving a fixture a couple inches can change the whole pattern down below. It's a lot of "little more, no, back" shouted across a yard at nine o'clock at night, and I'm sure the neighbors enjoy it.

It's about the most dark-sky friendly thing we do

I wrote a post in July about Arizona's dark sky rules, and moonlighting fits right in with all of that since the light is pointed at the ground and the canopy catches most of what would otherwise spill up into the sky. Out in Fountain Hills or Cave Creek, where people moved partly to see the stars, it's usually the first thing I suggest for a backyard.

Anyway

It isn't cheap next to a few uplights stuck in the gravel, mostly because of the labor and all that ladder time, and it doesn't make sense in every yard. If your big tree is a palm, or nothing back there is over about fifteen feet, I'll tell you to skip it and we'll figure out something else. But if there's a mature mesquite or palo verde sitting out there in the dark every night, you're kind of wasting it.

— Sam

Desert Outdoor Lighting has served the Phoenix Valley since 2004. We're licensed and bonded (ROC# 340142) and install landscape lighting and Gemstone permanent trim lighting in Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler, Scottsdale, Tempe, Queen Creek and across the Valley. Call (480) 809-7800 or request a free after-dark design visit.

The post The Lighting That Comes From Up in the Tree appeared first on Desert Outdoor Lighting.

I'm not, though, and this is basically the long version of what I end up saying on the phone.

The twelve dollar fixture

Most of the cheap ones are either plastic or thin cast aluminum with paint or powder coat on the outside. Back in Ohio that might hold up for a good while. Out here they have a very particular way of dying, and I've pulled enough of them out of yards in Gilbert and Chandler that I could almost tell you which summer they started going.

It usually starts with the finish.

What our sun does to aluminum and plastic

Plastic is the easy one to explain. UV breaks it down, so a fixture that spends five or six summers in direct sun goes chalky and then brittle, and one day somebody bumps it with a hose and it snaps right off at the stake. I've had customers hand me the pieces.

Aluminum takes longer and the problem is mostly the coating. The powder coat gets baked every afternoon and cooled off every night, and after a few years of that it starts chipping, especially where the sprinklers hit it or where the landscaper's string trimmer catches it every other week. Once bare metal is showing it oxidizes, and the threads where the cap or the lens screws on start seizing up, so you can't open the thing to service it without breaking something. Our water is hard enough to leave white crust on everything it touches and that doesn't help at all.

And a fixture you can't open is a fixture you throw away.

Why brass and copper hold up

Solid brass and copper don't have a coating to fail. The metal is the same all the way through, so there's nothing to chip off, and the threads stay workable for years because nothing is corroding into them. I can go back to a brass fixture we set a decade ago, unscrew the cap, swap the LED and be done in a couple minutes, and I do that pretty regularly on older jobs.

They're heavier too, which sounds like nothing until a monsoon wind comes through or somebody's dog decides a path light is a chew toy. The heavy ones stay aimed where you left them.

About the color change

People ask about this so I'll just cover it. A new brass fixture comes out of the box shiny and kind of gold, and within a year or so out here it goes dark brown and then starts heading toward that soft greenish patina, with copper doing roughly the same thing on its own schedule. Some folks get worried the first time they notice. That's just the metal protecting itself, and honestly I think it looks better, because a dark weathered fixture sitting in the granite next to an agave pretty much disappears during the day, which is the goal, since the only thing anybody should notice at night is the light itself.

If you really want it to stay shiny you'd be out there polishing it every few weeks for the rest of your life. I don't know anybody who does that.

Is it worth the extra money

For most people yes, but there's one case where I'll tell you it isn't. If you're selling the house in a year or two and you just want the yard looking good for the listing photos, a decent mid-grade aluminum fixture will get you there and I'll say so on the visit.

For a house you're staying in, a brass fixture costs more the one time you buy it and after that it mostly just sits out there working, whereas the cheap ones tend to need replacing somewhere around year three or four and then again a few years after that, with somebody's labor to dig each one out and set a new one every time. I've done that math with customers at their kitchen table and it doesn't take long before the expensive fixture comes out ahead, usually well inside the life of the first set. It's the same reason we stopped installing halogen years ago.

The few times I let somebody talk me into cheaper hardware I ended up back at that house replacing it and wishing I'd pushed a little harder.

— Sam

Desert Outdoor Lighting has served the Phoenix Valley since 2004. We're licensed and bonded (ROC# 340142) and install landscape lighting and Gemstone permanent trim lighting in Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler, Scottsdale, Tempe, Queen Creek and across the Valley. Call (480) 809-7800 or request a free after-dark design visit.

The post Why I Only Put Brass and Copper Fixtures in Arizona Yards appeared first on Desert Outdoor Lighting.

I think people don't ask because they assume it's obvious, or maybe they don't want to seem like they're worried about it. So here's the whole thing, start to finish, no mystery.

Before anybody shows up

The design walk already happened by this point, usually a few weeks earlier and almost always after dark, which is when we worked out what's getting lit and roughly where all of it goes. So by the time install day rolls around the plan is settled and nobody is standing in your driveway improvising.

There isn't much we need from you ahead of time. Mostly it's knowing where your outdoor outlets are and having a way into the side gate, plus a heads up if you've got dogs so that isn't something we find out at eight in the morning when somebody swings a gate open.

Morning: layout

The first thing that happens is we walk the property and physically set the fixtures on the ground where they're going, without connecting anything. It looks a little strange, like somebody scattered lights around your yard and left.

There's a reason for it though. A plan on paper is a plan on paper, and until you see the actual spacing against the actual plants, you don't really know. Every so often we get everything laid out and realize a fixture we intended for one agave is going to end up blasting straight into the neighbor's kitchen window, so we move it. Better to catch that now than after it's wired and buried.

If you're home, this is the best moment to walk it with us. Fixture positions are still completely free to change at this stage. Two hours later they're not, or at least not without redoing work.

Midday: wire and trenching

This is the long, boring, unglamorous part, and it's also the part that determines whether your system still works in ten years.

We run low-voltage wire from the transformer out to each fixture, tucked into shallow trenches, under the gravel, behind the block, along the base of the wall. In a desert yard this is mostly working through decomposed granite and caliche, and caliche is miserable stuff to dig, so this is where most of the day goes.

The connections are the part I'd tell you to care about, because every splice in a run is somewhere the system can eventually fail, and the ground out here heats and cools hard enough that things work themselves loose over the years. Then monsoon moisture finds the loose spot. So every junction we make gets a proper waterproof connector, which costs more and takes longer than twisting on a wire nut and wrapping the whole thing in electrical tape. I get called out to repair the electrical tape version fairly often, usually around three summers after somebody else put it in.

The transformer goes up near the outlet, and we deliberately size it larger than the job actually calls for so there's capacity sitting there for whatever you decide to add on later, which in my experience is just about everybody eventually.

Afternoon: mounting and burial

Fixtures get set while wires gets buried and everything gets cleaned up. By late afternoon your yard should look basically the way it did when we got there, except with fixtures in it.

For a typical residential landscape job we're usually talking one day. Bigger properties or anything with a lot of hardscape to work around can run two. Permanent trim on the roofline is its own animal and can be a day or two depending on how much roofline there is and how complicated the architecture gets.

After dark: the part that actually matters

Here's the thing almost nobody knows going in, and it's the part I care most about.

We come back at night. Not to check that the lights turn on, but to aim them. You cannot aim landscape lighting in daylight. It's not that it's harder, it's that it's genuinely impossible, because you cannot see what the light is doing until it's the only light there is.

So we're out there in the dark with a wrench, moving things a few degrees at a time. Maybe a fixture gets tilted down so it grazes up the ribs of a saguaro instead of washing it out flat, or one gets rotated off a window it was catching, or an uplight gets pulled back from a wall so the beam has some room to soften before it lands. It's fussy and it takes a while. It's also the step a lot of cheaper outfits skip entirely, since it means sending somebody back out a second time for work that never shows up as a line on the invoice.

If you're home for that part, come out. It's the fun bit. You'll see things get better in real time, and if there's something you don't love, right then is the easiest possible moment to change it.

Then we're done

We set the timer or the app schedule, show you how to run it, and go. You get a system that turns itself on at dusk and does its thing without you thinking about it.

The main thing I want people to take from this is that install day is not disruptive. There's no power shut off, no crew inside your house, no reason you can't work from home through the whole thing. Most of my customers spend the day doing entirely normal stuff and then walk outside that night to a house that looks different.

— Sam

Desert Outdoor Lighting has served the Phoenix Valley since 2004. Licensed and bonded, ROC# 340142. Get in touch for a free after-dark design visit and we'll walk your property together.

The post What Actually Happens on Install Day appeared first on Desert Outdoor Lighting.

Then a fair number of them get a little suspicious about it, usually because some smart home gadget has let them down before, and I don't blame anybody for that at all. Everybody's got a story about a thermostat that stopped talking to their wifi or a video doorbell that needed its app replaced. So I'd rather just walk through what people really end up using on these, and I'll be upfront about the parts that get played with for a week and then never touched again.

Scheduling, which is the actual killer feature

This is the boring one, and it's the one that matters most.

You set the lights to come on at sunset and go off at whatever hour you pick, and then you never think about it again. Not a clock time either, sunset specifically, which shifts every day of the year. In Phoenix that swing is real. Sunset moves from around 5:20 in December to past 7:40 in June, and a system running on a fixed clock time is wrong for most of the year.

Coming on right at sunset is often too early, because there's still plenty of light in the sky and the roofline just looks washed out and faint. Most of my customers end up somewhere around twenty or thirty minutes after sunset, once the sky has actually gone blue. That's the window where the lights suddenly look like something.

The off time is more personal and some people run until midnight, some shut down at ten, and a few leave the front on all night because they like coming home to a lit house. There's no right answer, though I'd say if you've got neighbors whose bedroom windows face your place, be a decent human about the back patio.

People underestimate all of this because it isn't flashy. But it's the feature that makes the whole system feel effortless instead of like one more thing to manage. My customers who've had trim for a few years mostly interact with the app a handful of times a year, and that's the system working correctly.

Zones, which sound boring and aren't

Zones let you control different runs separately. Front roofline, back patio, garage side, whatever divisions make sense for your house.

Where this earns its keep is that you almost never want the whole house doing the same thing. Come Christmas you might want red and green across the front where the street sees it, and warm white in back where you're actually sitting, because eating dinner under flashing red and green gets old fast.

I've got a customer in Gilbert whose setup I think about a lot as the good example. Her front roofline runs a schedule she basically never changes. The back patio is on its own zone that she turns on when people are over and leaves off the rest of the time. And the garage side, which faces her neighbor, she keeps at a low warm white year round so it's functional without being a light show pointed at somebody's house. Three zones, three completely different jobs, one system.

Nobody has ever once asked me about zones before buying a system. Then a year in it's one of the things people bring up on their own, which I've always found a little funny.

Worth knowing at design time: zones get decided when we lay out the runs, not afterward. Splitting a zone later usually means pulling the channel and rerunning it. So if you have any sense that you'd want the back separate from the front, say it during the design walk and it costs you nothing.

Scenes, where it gets fun

A scene is just a saved setup. Colors, pattern, brightness, all stored under a name so you can pull it up in one tap instead of rebuilding it.

Most people end up with somewhere between five and ten that they actually use, and the list is fairly predictable. There's a warm white one for everyday, something for Christmas, usually orange and purple around Halloween, red white and blue in the summer, and team colors if anybody in the house cares about a team. Then there's normally a personal one or two on top of that, a birthday or just a color somebody in the family likes.

The everyday warm white scene is the one that surprises people. They buy the system imagining holidays and then discover that the version they run 300 nights a year is a plain warm white line along the roof that makes the house look like it belongs in a magazine. I'd guess that's the most-used scene across every customer I have.

One practical thing about building scenes. Do it at night, standing outside, looking at your actual house. Everybody's first instinct is to sit on the couch and pick colors off the phone screen, and the colors never look the way you expect once they're forty feet up on stucco. Tan stucco in particular will pull a lot of colors warm, so the crisp blue you picked on the screen lands somewhere closer to teal. Ten minutes in the driveway saves you a lot of fiddling.

The part nobody asks about, which is where the controller lives

Here's something that never comes up in a sales conversation and absolutely should, especially here.

The controller is a small piece of electronics that has to live somewhere outside, usually near the transformer or tucked up under an eave. Which means it spends its life in Arizona. We put ours in shaded locations wherever the run allows, in enclosures rated for outdoor use, because a controller baking in direct west-facing sun through August is a controller with a shortened life. This is one of those things that separates installs that are still working in year seven from the ones that aren't.

The other half of it is wifi. Your router is probably in an office in the middle of the house, and the controller is out at the roofline behind a couple of stucco walls, and stucco has wire mesh in it that eats wifi signal. I've seen systems that worked perfectly during the demo and then dropped constantly once everybody went inside and the house filled up with other devices. Worth asking whoever installs yours how they're going to verify signal strength at the controller rather than at the front door.

The first week, honestly

Expect to overuse it. Everybody does, and it's fine.

The first several nights people cycle through every color in the app, try the patterns, show the neighbors, change it three times in an evening. I've had customers text me photos at eleven at night. Then somewhere around week two or three it settles down, they land on their handful of scenes, and the system fades into being part of the house.

We set the initial schedule and build the first few scenes with you on install day so you're not starting from a blank app. But I'd tell you to give it a few weeks before deciding you've got it dialed in, because what you think you want on night one and what you actually run in March are usually different things.

Now the honest part about the gimmicks

There are features in these apps that exist to look good in a showroom.

Chase and twinkle patterns are the big one, where the lights animate and run along the roofline. They're a lot of fun for about four days, and then your neighbors start quietly wondering when it's going to stop, and honestly so do you. I'm not saying never do it, because a slow chase on Christmas Eve is genuinely charming, but I've yet to meet anybody who ran animation year round and stayed happy about it.

Music sync is the other one people get excited about. It works fine and it's a legitimately cool party trick, and I think I've watched somebody actually use it twice. If a person is picking between systems based on whether the lights dance to Mariah Carey, I usually try to redirect them toward thinking about build quality instead.

What actually makes people glad they bought the thing is much duller than any of that. It's the schedule running correctly every single night without being asked, and having the zones set up in a way that matches how you use the house, and being able to find the four or five scenes you care about without hunting through a menu.

What to ask before you buy anything

A few things I'd want to know if I were shopping, regardless of who you end up hiring.

Find out whether it runs on your local wifi and whether it keeps working when your internet drops, because a system that goes dark on you just because the provider is having a bad night was designed badly. The specific question worth asking is whether the schedule lives on the controller itself or up in the cloud somewhere.

I'd also ask whether more than one person in the house can control the thing or if it's all tied to a single phone. That sounds like nothing when you're standing there buying it and turns into a real irritation about six months later when you're out of town and somebody at home wants the lights off.

Ask about Alexa or Google if you use either one, since support varies a lot between brands and some of it is pretty half-baked. It's a nice extra when it works properly. I wouldn't buy a system for it.

Then ask how firmware updates happen, and whether they've ever pushed one that broke something. Any honest installer will tell you yes, because everybody in this industry has had a rough update at some point. What you're really listening for is how fast it got sorted out.

And find out what happens to the app if the company behind it goes under, which in this industry is not remotely hypothetical given how many brands have come and gone in the past few years. You want to know whether you'd be left with a working system on your house or just a very expensive run of dead LEDs up under your fascia.

Anyway

The app is genuinelywhat t makes permanent trim worth owning rather than just a fancier version of Christmas lights. It's also the part where the marketing gets loudest and least useful, so it's worth going in knowing which questions matter.

I'm happy to just show you all of it. It's a lot easier to understand standing in front of a house with the lights on than reading about it, and honestly the demo is my favorite part of the job.

— Sam

Desert Outdoor Lighting has served the Phoenix Valley since 2004. Licensed and bonded, ROC# 340142. Get in touch for a free after-dark design visit and I'll run you through it on your own roofline.

The post What People Actually Do With Their Lighting App After the First Week appeared first on Desert Outdoor Lighting.

Fair enough. It is more money up front. But then I asked him how long he'd been paying a crew to do his lights every year, and he had to think about it. Turned out it was eleven years. He'd never once added it up.

So that's what this post is. Not a sales pitch exactly, just the arithmetic that almost nobody runs on themselves.

The number nobody tracks

Seasonal installation around the Valley generally runs somewhere in the range of $600 to $1,200 for a typical single-story home, depending on how much roofline you've got and whether you want the trees and the walkway done too. That covers the install, and usually the takedown in January, and it often includes the lights themselves as a rental.

Here's the thing about that number though. It's not a purchase. It's a subscription you re-up every November, and because it shows up once a year buried in the middle of holiday spending, it never really registers as a line item. It just feels like part of Christmas.

Run it out ten years at the low end and you're at six grand. At the higher end you're past twelve. And at the end of those ten years you own exactly nothing. Every January the lights come down and go back on somebody's truck.

What the other side of it looks like

Permanent trim is a one-time install. The channel goes up under your fascia, the bulbs are individual RGB LEDs rated for something like 50,000 hours, and the whole thing is built to sit out in Arizona weather year-round. There's no takedown. There's no January phone call. It's just part of your house now, the way your gutters are.

Depending on the size of the house and how much roofline we're covering, most installs land in a range where the crossover against seasonal service happens somewhere around year eight or nine. After that point you're simply not spending the money anymore, and everything past the crossover is money you would have handed to somebody else.

This doesn't work for everybody though and I'd rather just say so. If you think you might sell in the next couple of years, permanent trim probably isn't your move and I'd tell you to go hire a seasonal crew instead. It really only pulls ahead once you're staying put a while, which most of my customers in Gilbert and Queen Creek happen to be, though certainly not all of them.

The stuff that doesn't show up in the numbers

There's a whole category of value here that's hard to put a dollar figure on but that people bring up constantly after the fact.

You're not locked into the three-week install window anymore. If you want your lights on the night after Halloween, they're on. If you want them running through New Year's and then off, done, from your couch.

You also get the other 320 days of the year. This is the part people underestimate before they own it and then won't shut up about afterward. Warm white along the roofline on an ordinary Tuesday looks fantastic and reads as architectural rather than festive. Orange for Halloween, red white and blue in July, your team's colors when there's a game. One of my customers does purple for her daughter's birthday every year, which I thought was a little much until I saw it and it was great.

And nobody's on your roof. I've been doing this a long time and I've seen enough ladder injuries around the holidays to feel strongly about it. Even if you're hiring that out, that's a person on your roof every single year, twice.

Go run your own numbers

Honestly the ranges I gave you up there don't matter much, so use yours instead. Go pull up whatever you paid last season and multiply it by however many more years you figure you'll realistically be living in this house. That figure, the whole run of it rather than the single year, is what you'd actually be setting against the cost of an install.

Most people are a little surprised once they do that, and one or two have gotten kind of irritated with me for bringing it up in the first place, which I understand because nobody enjoys running that particular calculation on themselves. But the decision is sitting in front of you either way, and it seemed worth doing with real numbers instead of a gut feeling about which option sounds cheaper.

If you want, I'll do the math with you. I'm not going to talk you into permanent trim if the numbers say seasonal is right for your situation, because that's a bad way to run a business and I'd rather you trust me in five years when things have changed.

— Sam

Desert Outdoor Lighting has served the Phoenix Valley since 2004. Licensed and bonded, ROC# 340142. Get in touch for a free after-dark design visit and we'll put real numbers to it.

The post What You’re Really Spending on Christmas Lights Every Year appeared first on Desert Outdoor Lighting.