Converting Landscape lighting to LED---FINISHED, now with addendum

About 3 years ago I threw a Birthday party for my wife who was having one of those “milestone” birthdays. Our house is set back off the road and the driveway is dark at night. As a lot of guests were expected, some of them elderly, I suddenly realized that I had to hook up some lighting quick. I went to the home center and picked up 2 lampposts and a couple of large square concrete patio tiles. I bolted the posts to the concrete, wired the lights to an AC plug and hand trucked them into place. I had a bunch of 100’ extension cords that I got years before for cheap and ran them out to the posts. Worked great. Originally I had intended to make them more permanent but that didn’t happen for another 3 years. Actually it is amazing to me that those extension cords lasted through all the rain and snow for all that time. A few weeks ago I put down conduit pipe and finished the job.
Now that I have a permanent source of AC down at the entrance of the driveway I can install some landscape lighting. I have tried those solar landscape stakes in the past. They are cheap and easy to install,just stick them in the ground, but they just don’t work. They are not very bright, don’t shine all night, and the solar cell tends to cloud up after a very short time.

The proper way to do it is to use low voltage lights that are powered by 12AC. They haven’t sold well recently, probably because everyone is caught up in the fantasy of using the solar powered stakes. I was in Lowes one day about 2 years ago and came across a nice 12V lantern light that was on clearance for $1.56. This was ordinarily a $25 light, nothing to think about, I bought all 13 that they had left. Besides the included bulb costs more than that and I could at least use the bulbs as replacement for the lighting that we already have up at the house. It was a no brainer. Here is a picture of 1 of the lights assembled. Made of metal and the globe is glass.

As it is, had I paid full price for the 13 lights, it would have cost me $325.00. But I only paid about $30! There’s a problem though, the include bulbs are 10W halogens. 13 lights times 10 watts means I will need to buy a big, expensive power supply. I know!, I’ll convert to LED. Much less power not only means less electricity to operate, but also a much cheaper power supply can be used.
So instead of having to buy this:

I can use what I already have, a 12V 5A power brick for an old 15 minute AA fast charger.

And because LEDs use much less current I don’t need to buy 3 of these 12 gauge 100’ coils of landscape wire.

Instead, I can use 4 of these much cheaper 18 gauge 80’ coils.

This is the bulb that was included with the fixtures that I bought, 10W Halogen.

What I now need to do is make an led “bulb” that will fit this socket

It must run on 12V as that is what the power brick supplies. I had just the thing already. I had a half spool of these LEDs that I bought at FastTech. The whole spool of 300 LEDs was $10

Here is a closeup of the strip. Notice that each set of 3 leds are in series with each other and a current limiting resistor. On the top and bottom of the strip there are the + and - buss. at each end there are copper solder pads. This strip can be cut to any length as it is configured in a series-parallel connetion.


To make a “bulb” I took a wooden dowel and cut it to length. The pins for the connection are brass brads.

I drilled holes almost all the way through the dowel and drove the brad through the rest of the way

The LED strip is just peel and stick!

2 strips of 3 LED’s wired in parallel.


The 12V power supply for the LED’s picked up AC power in a lamppost and I hung the brick inside the pole to keep it off the ground. This is about where it will be inside the pole.

The secondary wire, 12V, was buried underground.

Final installation:

Total cost:
13 light posts - $30
Power Supply - already had, but about $10 if you had to buy it (Not $139.00 for high power if halogen)
Wire - $20, 4 coils of 18 gauge @$5.00 each ( not $165 for 3 coils of 12 gauge)
Dowel, already had it
LED’s, had that too but a whole spool of 300 is $10 at FastTech.

Now the caveat. The bulbs that I made are a little too white to be attractive for landscape lighting for a residence. The color would be more appropriate for a commercial setting, therefore I have ordered these bulbs from FastTech. They are G4 base, same as my original bulb and they have a warmer tint (or so they say)
It will take 3 weeks to get them though.

https://www.fasttech.com/products/1364710

The whole point of this post is that because wired landscape lighting is not selling well, it is possible to pick up the fixtures at clearance prices. If you are willing to convert over to LED, a lot of money can be saved in the process.
For some reason, I have not seen the wired landscape lighting using LED’s in the stores yet. It seems that the marketers are also chasing the fantasy of selling the solar powered sticks.

A house down the road has a bunch of landscape lighting that uses Sylvania MR16 LED bulbs. They are installed in completely sealed, waterproof fixtures. Tha packaging on the bulbs states clearly “Not for use in sealed fixtures.” The bulbs draw around 6-8 watts, are rather small, and get to about 85C in open air. No telling how long they will last in those sealed fixtures.

My G4 hologen replacements: Hera halogen counter light Nichia 219 retrofit

I would love to see pic of this lit up at night time with the led’s.

Very nice post! With history and everything :slight_smile: . Thanks for the “cork” dowel idea, I might just use them some day.

I have some of the strips, really don’t like them. Way too white for me, and the surrounding looks flat, lacking depth.

If I were to suggest, for future projects maybe you’d want to take a look at those generic 12V chinese led, the warm white is nice. I’ve gotten them last time at about 73cents apiece (lot of 10) from Aliexpress. In any case, there’s a promotion sale on Aliexpress, October 15th, a lot of sellers will participate (that seems how they work), maybe there will be similar deals.

Looking forward for night pics!

So I see I am walking down the same path as you previously! Proves that it is a path worth taking :slight_smile:
As of yet I have not installed a photo sensor for automatic dusk to dawn lighting. Do you know if one will mess with the power supply for the LED’s?

Nice lights, really really nice. These Led solar lamps work okay for a year but after that the solar panel and battery is dead, I tried to refurbish some but all electronic was wet and corroded too so I just tossed them away.

What about a standard wall wart timer for evening lighting?

Not much to see in the dark!
As I said in the OP, they are a little too white for me.
OMG, I am becoming a tint snob!

There is a link in the OP to the G4’s that I have on order from FastTech. Yes they are too white and I realized that as I was installing them. Here is a pic of the first 4 lights, 2 running on the LED’s and 2 with the original 10W Halogen.

The lamppost contains 3 x 40W equivalent CFL’s (420 lumens each) warm white.
The 10W Halogen are 120 lumens in warm white, The LED’s are about 24 lumen and are too cool.

The LED’s that I ordered are supposed to be 100 lumen in warm white. We shall see.
Here is a closeup of the lamppost, I have just replaced 2 of the CFL,s with LED’s for comparison. So far I like these bulbs. Picked them up at Costco, pack of 3 for $10. Special price, subsidized buy Connecticut.

Nice project. I think they look great. You've been on a creating rampage lately.

My take on LED strip lights:

And a light conversion that uses them:

You can get 2700K striplights, but the first ones that I ordered came in as over 5000K

I think these look great. Thanks for the night pic. Yeah tint is a matter of taste or what effect your are looking for but I was more interested in how much light they actually give, which seems to be plenty. I really like those lamp posts.

The G4 LED bulbs that I ordered from FastTech have arrived. It was simple matter of opening the fixtures and replacing my constructed bulbs with the new ones from FT.
A Pic of the bulbs from FT vs my “hack”

I love these new bulbs! They are warm white and look gorgeous. More lumens too. I will have to wait and see how they hold up in the extremes of the outdoors.
To the naked eye they do not appear quite as bright as this pic. I had to increase the exposure time, otherwise they would not photograph at all.

Compare this pic showing 3 if the FT LEDs and lamp post with a previous pic of 4 fixures, 2 with my hacked LED and the other 2 with the 10W halogen

One last step is to install timers for the lights to turn on and off. I didn’t want to use a photocell as I was afraid it would mess with the electronics of the 12V DC power supply. What I chose to use was an electronic timer that I got at Home Depot several years ago. They were on clearance for a little over a dollar apiece. I bought a bunch, 20 or so. I figured they didn’t sell or there were a lot of returns because people couldn’t or wouldn’t program them. I gifted some of them at Christmas time, as that would be a good use for them. The rest sat around until last summer when I pulled one out to use. Guess what?, I couldn’t get it to work.

Well for this project, I was motivated, and this time I actually read the directions and concentrated. Yes, they work. Just had to read the instructions! This timer actually has a mechanical relay and as such shouldn’t affect the electronics of the LED supply.

What I did is remove the integrated plug in the back of the unit and disconnected the output jack. This so I could hard wire the unit into my lamp post. Notice the smaller gray and white wires connected to the circuit board and the plug parts laying next to it. The plug socket is still in place but disconnected.

I used 18 gauge wire to hard wire it to the timer. The timer will handle 15A but I am only needing a couple of amps for the LED’s. Besides if anything goes wrong, those thin wires will act as a fuse. :smiley:
I hardwired them into the lamp posts, there are 2 and installed them in a water proof electrical box.
Then strapped the box to the back of the lamp posts, out of sight.

If I need to reprogram the time settings, I can unscrew the waterproof access panel.

this is awesome! Thanks for sharing, I too have looked at my “professionally” installed landscape lighting around my house and thought that the color was too “cool white” for my liking. I wish I never found this site and became a tint snob. haha

Fantastic, cheap and creative. What more could you ask. I love your mod. I’m not showing the better half though. Sorry.


Thanks for sharing the build, this thread is a really nice read. Although I will never do anything like it (I live 2 floors up in an apartment in the city) I always enjoy reading about such projects and the smart solutions to problems that people like you come up with :-) .

(I like Garry's never ending tractor light build thread as well, every now and then I enjoy visiting the thread and see the latest progress, I wished it will never be finished )

Thanks for following this. You are right about never ending projects. I am sort of disappointed that it is finished. However, there is still the tinkering to be done. :slight_smile: As I said here before, most of us here are not modders, but rather tinkerers. I suppose I will continue to make small, incremental improvements over time, or perhaps it will fail and I will have to start all over. Time will tell.

Now if only the fans would come in for my light bar build…….

Great project! (Just saw this thread for the first time.) I'd love to find some clearanced landscape lighting to convert over! About my "never ending tractor light build thread": I just can't find time to get back to it. Just when I thought life was crazy busy it got busier! I'm really trying to get back to it and finish it before winter hits.

-Garry

Thanks Garry,

Keep your eyes open, a deal on landscape lighting will come along. Right one of the HD’s around here has nice metal fixtures on clearance for about $6. They are about equivalent to the ones I used, but cost a little more. If I had to do it over, I wouldn’t mind spending that much on the fixtures. Remember, they go for about $25 usually. Besides, they are at $6 now, they could go lower later. Next time I am in that store, I will photo that deal for you.

Thanks for the knowledge.

When I finished this project up, I got so much satisfaction that I just had to have more! How to do that? That was easy, about 10 years ago I had installed landscape lighting up around the house. At the time, it was half fun and half chore to install them. I got “the kit” that included 15 plastic fixtures, a couple of spotlights (never installed those), the transformer and 100’ of 14 gauge wire. The included bulbs were 4 watt incandescent. The transformer had a mechanical timer and they turned off and on at the proper times once set. All well and good. Over the years, once and while a bulb would blow and I would use one from the unused spotlights to replace it. Sometimes when I was mowing or blowing leaves, one of the globes would blow away. Sometimes I couldn’t find it. The bulbs can cost 2-3 dollars apiece which can add up. Eventually, I started to notice the same fixtures sold separately and on clearance at various stores. I would grab what I could when they were $1. I figured great, bulbs and spare parts. The point of this part is that I just wasn’t that into the landscape lights, they were on the periphery of my interest. Then along came my project in the OP.

When I finished it, it was obvious, the next thing to do was upgrade the existing lighting. That will be fun, and easy! The bulbs in those fixtures are 4W T10 incans. So I went online and found some suitable replacement LED’s here:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/171076233212?item=171076233212&viewitem=&sspagename=ADME:L:OC:US:3160&vxp=mtr
They came in today and I set about to install them. But wait, LED’s run on DC. My existing system is AC. But then, an LED is a diode, it shouldn’t matter right? It will conduct in the positive cycle of the AC and block the current in the negative. If anything the light wouldn’t be quite as bright. Maybe there would be flicker.
Anyway, I decided I would just plug one bulb in and see what happens. It worked, no flicker that I could see but older people may develop “long persistence eyes” Also I confirmed that he LED bulbs work each way they are plugged in. Going great, so I went about removing the old incans and replacing them. As I went through, I could see that the system was getting slightly brighter every time I replaced one of those 4W incans with an LED. Not only would I save money on electricity, but I would end up with more light and less stress on the power supply. Finished!, but wait, I want more. I want more satisfaction, I want to keep extending the fun I’m having. So I think, what if I install a full wave bridge rectifier at the transformer. Now instead of just passing current through the LED’s during a half cycle, I can get current going through both. It should be even brighter. So that’s what I did, I happened to have one from a power brick that blew last week (the filter cap, probably the most common failure). The bridge was still good so I used it. After that, I had to turn some of the bulbs around as I now had polarity to follow, and the lights are a little brighter. If there was any flicker that I couldn’t see, it would now be flickering at twice the frequency, from 60Hz to 120Hz. But I still want more, more satisfaction. So that last thing I did was round up all the globes and brought them in the house and washed them in the kitchen sink. As I was doing that I thought how odd it is that the very globes that would blow all over the yard when I did the leaves, the globes that I could hardly be concerned enough to even make sure they were secured properly, are in the sink and I am washing them. And I am happy to do it! After they were cleaned up I re-installed them and they look great!

The reason I wrote this long story is because tonight I reaffirmed something I had already learned and I hope someone here can benefit from it. One is that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to possess something that you can hold dear. The lights that I just converted over to LED, the ones never paid attention too, are now endeared to me. Not because they were expensive, but because through my efforts they became better. Same as when we mod a flashlight. It doesn’t have to make economic sense, it just has to become endeared to the modder, for whatever reason. The other thing I learned is that the really nice metal fixtures as in my first post do not look any different in the dark! It’s the light we’re interested in here.

Now the pics:
This is a brand new fixture, one of the spares that I had originally purchased for parts to maintain the ones installed 10 years ago. Everything is plastic, but they look great at night.


The bulbs. From left to right, the 10W halogen in the fixture of the OP, the replacement G4 LED from FastTech. Next is the original T10 4W incan from the plastic fixture above, then the LED replacement that I bought off eBay. The last bulb on the right is an earlier effort that I bought from DX a couple of years ago.

If I remember correctly is was 2 or 3 dollars and was a putrid purple in color, eck!!! I only bought the one as an experiment and it was awful. These new bulbs from eBay are not quite as warm as the FastTech ones, but they will do.

Am I finished? Part of me wants to do more. I suppose I could add a filter capacitor to the bridge and up the voltage as it reads a little low. 9V AC before I installed the bridge and 9V DC after. A capacitor that is large enough should bring the voltage up to about 12.5, but you know what? I am going to leave well enough alone. Sometimes the enemy of good, is better.

Thanks for the update :-)

Well, I guess that most people will get attached to things they make/fix themselves. I need only one flashlight and I can not easily part from any of the many I modded. I work in a school as a technical and teaching assistent and the general way to fix things, even in my school with low budgets, is to throw them away instead of fixing them. I do make the assessment of how much time/money it takes to fix something instead of replacing them, but sometimes I just fix it anyway, fixed things have more personality, it gives me more pleasure in my job, and that again makes me more friendly to the pupils and colleages too :-) (Occasionally I make teaching materials from scratch, especially when the 'official' items from a education materials company have a cheap and plastic base, and I can make it from wood or metal )