Ian wrote:

First of all, these are not security lights and there was never
any requirement for the high wattage halogen type things - I just
want a bit of light so that I can take something out the back

That was my reason for fitting them - setup so that you get light should
you approach the bin from either front or back doors.

to the bin at night without stepping in dog poo (our dog has
access to the outside via a flap on the back door).

Interesting idea - ours still has a conventional sphincter.... Oh I see
what you mean! ;-)

Perhaps I should explain my original intention a bit better. The
door is on the side of the house. The understairs cupboard ('pantry')
is accessed from the kitchen and is where the consumer unit is
located. One of the walls of this cupboard is part of the side
wall of the house. What I had therefore imagined doing was to

Pretty much the setup we have - I selected the consumer unit cupboard
(to call it a pantry in our case would be over egging it a bit!) since
it was an easy place to find power and was on the right wall.

If I go with the PIR idea and forget about the need for a convenient
switch next to the back door, I can get this down to one vertical run

My switch is in the "pantry" as such... must admit I have never found
the need to switch the light off manually as yet, the PIRs work well.
Might be handy at bulb changing time though.

that enters at the top of the pantry (about 5 feet off the ground).
I can put a slightly less convenient switch in the pantry for
overriding when I need it, but rely on the PIRs for day-to-day
convenience. Also, I can run this vertical cable behind the soil
pipe, so it should be pretty well protected.

In our case the power comes in overhead and runs down the wall in a
vertical conduit before going through the wall to the power company fuse
etc. Hence to avoid having to make an ugly crossover of conduits, I
brought my own connection out about a foot below this and wired out to
each lamp from the-

#
#
PIR-------LAMP-------- # ----------LAMP--------PIR
| # |
| # |
| # |
| # |
| # |
| # |
| # |
| |
| |
----O-----

Where '#' indicates the incoming feed from the overhead wire, and 'O' is
the conduit 2 way junction box.

(The second PIR on the right I actually took about a foot round the
corner of the house, so that it is on the back wall of the house near
the back door - this was to avoid it "looking" anywhere near the boilers
flue)

In the light of the helpful replies (thanks to John in particular for
the screwfix details), I will use heavy duty PVC trunking. Is the
screwfix stuff definitely suitable for exterior use? Also, it was
suggested to use standard cable inside trunking - is this OK? As
far as I can see, only the temperature aspect of the weather will
have a bearing.

The conduit is pretty thick walled stuff. If in doubt you can give it a
coat of paint at some point to protect it from UV light which will tend
to make it brittle over prolonged exposure.

The temperature is not too much of a problem. The PVC insulation on the
cable is good for at least 70 deg C. The lower limit is less important
since its the flexibility that goes in the cold - and this setup won't
(with luck) be moving anywhere.

It is usually simpler to get individual wires through conduit rather
than complete PVC sheathed flat cable. Depends much on how many wires
and how long the run of conduit is. In my case I fed a bit of gardening
wire through first and pulled the cable with that. With hindsight I
should have bought an electricians fish tape:-

http://www.screwfix.com/app/sfd/cat/...14033&id=14072

Rather than use three core and earth, I took the feed cable through the
bulkhead lamp and out to the PIR and then had a second cable back to the
lamp. Hence the short straight 1.5m run between the PIR and bulkhead
has two cables in it.

--
Cheers,

John.

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