I'm thinking of putting low voltage garden lighting in my garden in a
couple of months when I can afford it, but I'm thinking of installing
the cable now. What outdoor electical cable should I use and
transformer with in mind installing around 8 spot lights at 20 watts
each. I've already installed plastic tubing around the garden (under
patio etc)so at the moment I will be able to run the cable in now and
terminate at a later date.

wrote:
I'm thinking of putting low voltage garden lighting in my garden in a
couple of months when I can afford it, but I'm thinking of installing
the cable now. What outdoor electical cable should I use and
transformer with in mind installing around 8 spot lights at 20 watts
each. I've already installed plastic tubing around the garden (under
patio etc)so at the moment I will be able to run the cable in now and
terminate at a later date.


various options, depending how its done. The wire needs to be:
- mechanically adequate
- rated for the current
- give small enough v drop

Now you get to decide whether to do it in 12v on one cable, 12v with
each light on own cable, 24v, etc.

You could even use bell wire if you picked the right configuration and
routing, so you se there is no one simple answer.


NT

In message .com,
writes
I'm thinking of putting low voltage garden lighting in my garden in a
couple of months when I can afford it, but I'm thinking of installing
the cable now. What outdoor electical cable should I use and
transformer with in mind installing around 8 spot lights at 20 watts
each. I've already installed plastic tubing around the garden (under
patio etc)so at the moment I will be able to run the cable in now and
terminate at a later date.

LV lighting kits normally come with cabling and transformer.

They normally come in sets of four, so you'll need two sets


--
geoff

I've just done that.

I decided to use one suitably housed 12V transformer ( a proper iron
one rather than an electronic one ) and run four sets of 12 V lights
from it - each set drawing a total of 20W. There's enough capacity to
run more lighting too.

The cable I used was quite thick speaker cable. A surplus shop was
selling 100 ft reels of it for a few pounds. As it turns out, apart
from the colour, it's identical to what was supplied with the lights -
it works with the insulation displacement connections that they employ.

I buried long lengths of corrugated round plastic 20mm conduit to
protect the cable. Then drew a cord into them by using a vacuum cleaner
to suck a small wad of bog paper tied to the cord which was fed in from
the other end and then the cables were pulled through ( leaving another
cord inside in case another cable needs to be added later )

Each conduit carried two or three cables, one for each set of lights,
so that voltage loss was minimised. I used commercial waterproof
connectors mounted in small plastic IP66 boxes so that the lights can
be disconnected if needs be.

The end result is great and my partner is delighted with it.