It’s long been said that “a man’s home is his castle” (I’m sure we can all agree to update this to “a person’s home is their castle”), and having your guests stop by your castle for drinks or dinner is a time-honored tradition we’d love to see continue. As your guests pull up to your castle, they get their first glimpse of where you live and how your home reflects your personal style and tastes.
One of the best ways of adding a “wow factor” to your castle is to add landscape lighting to illuminate your space when the sun makes a hasty exit. We’ll blanket the term “landscape lighting” to include outdoor illumination for safety, security, nighttime aesthetics, recreation and event applications.
Using lighting to guide your guests to your door is just one of the many applications of landscape lighting. One of our favorite uses of landscape lighting is to add dramatic effects to outstanding features of your home… You can add a spotlight at the base of an ancient tree to provide dramatic shadowing. Perhaps add lighting in the branches of the tree instead shining straight down, again creating dramatic shadowing. Stone or brick homes look amazing with a spotlight close to the home shining almost directly up, again providing dramatic shadows. Have a statue or a fountain you’d love for people to see? Adding underwater spotlights to that fountain will (you guessed it) add dramatic shadowing to your home.
Let’s assume that most of us didn’t have great-great-great Grandfathers who created the railroad industry or happened to have won the latest lottery drawing. For those of us who work for a living, cost is a critical factor into how much landscape lighting we can employ to make our homes pop at twilight. Luckily, we have put together this guideline designed to inform you of what to expect (dollar-wise) in landscape lighting cost on your next landscaping project.
There are three areas to consider when weighing landscape lighting costs:
Cost of the Lights
By far the biggest cost in creating your landscape lighting plan is purchasing all the stuff (stuff being lights, wiring and connectors, transformers and controller/timers).
Lights
Here’s a quick guide to give you an idea of what to expect, depending on the type of landscape lighting you prefer:
Type of Fixture
Average Cost
Installed Price Range
Pathway Lights
$125
$50-$225
Floodlights
$170
$75-$300
Uplights
$250
$100-$450
Downlights
$250
$100-$450
Low-voltage Lights
$130
$90-$160
Porch Lights
$170
$75-$300
Security Lights
$450
$350-$550
Lamp Posts
$750
$400-$1,100
String Lights
$100
$50-$160
Holiday Lights
$440
$220-$660
Let’s take an easy implementation as an example landscape lighting cost. We want to have the pathway from our driveway to front door lit with bollards (path lights), and we’ll need seven path lights to make this work. We can count on an average cost of $125 each, or $875 for the lights…
Wiring and connectors
Transformers
If using a low-voltage system (like a 12-volt), you’ll need a transformer to change the 120v house current into 12v landscaping current. Though these have a range of pricing, you can count on about $550 for this transformer… bringing our total job cost to $1,755.
Controller/Timer
Installation Costs
Maintenance
Cut your costs
Firstly, you have to know if your electrical panel has “space” to add a new circuit. If so, you’re good-to-go, but if you’re already maxed out, a new subpanel will cost between $400 and $1800 (depending on your setup). That said, the wiring itself will run between $3 and $5 per linear foot.
In our example, path lights are placed roughly six feet apart (and we’re staggering them, left then six feet farther on right and so on) …which means our wire run will be a total run of about 80 feet, or about $320… so far the job will cost about $1,195.
If you have selected a low-voltage system (typically 12-volt), you’ll need to budget in some connectors. A good rule of thumb is to budget one connector per light. In our example with 7 lights, we’d need seven connectors at roughly $1 each (we’d buy 10 because there’s a good chance I’ll lose one or two)… making the total job cost $1,205.
Working in conjunction with your transformer (which sometimes has a timer built-in), you can get an analog, digital or smart timer for $50-$100 to control your landscape lighting. The smart controllers are fantastic, in that you can set a schedule through an app on your smart phone and your landscape lighting will obey (even during those pesky time changes). And, of course, you can turn your lighting on and off at will through the app. Total job cost of our example $1,855.
The costs we have quoted so far include installation from a qualified professional. Any additional work (installing GFI outlets for instance) would be billed at the installer’s rate (typically running $100-$200 per hour). For our example installation, the labor costs are approximately $500 out of the $1,855 total cost.
Note that if you need to have digging and trenching done to run an underground electrical service, this would increase your costs by approximately $8 per foot… assuming we wanted our example installation to be buried appropriately underground, we will incur as much as 80ft. x $8 per foot, or $640 additional bringing our total job cost to $2,495.
There are really only two maintenance pieces to concern yourself with; replacing bulbs and replacing fixtures that have worn down over time. Bulbs are interesting – select LED bulbs wherever possible. Not only do they last as much as 50 times as long as incandescent bulbs, but they use about 25% of the electricity! Sure, they may be a little more expensive to buy, but their operational costs make LEDs a no-brainer!
A little note here; when selecting LED fixtures, look for those that have replaceable bulbs (or buy standard incandescent fixtures and buy an LED bulb to go in it). Integrated LED fixtures are fantastic and will last a LONG time, but when they die the bulbs are non-replaceable and the entire fixture must be replaced.
Replacing fixtures is a little more problematic… local outdoor lighting repair services charge as much as $200 per hour (and that’s not including the cost of the replaced fixture) and can easily run $250-$750 depending on what must be replaced.
So, our little 7-light path landscaping project is $2,495 plus tax… seems a little steep, eh? Why is it that landscape lighting is so expensive? Because landscape lighting is taking a beating from Mother Nature 24/7, they are built to withstand extreme temperatures (including ice, rain and snow). To become so dependable, these devices are crafted out of super-strong materials like cast brass, and they are fitted with water-resistant wiring. All these beefy components are spendy, and the price of the fixture reflects the quality that goes into the products.
When designing your landscape lighting plan, work with your existing landscaping. Don’t install lights that need trenching through a retaining wall or that you dig up your garden.
Perhaps you don’t need all those pretty uplights that show off your 200-year-old oak trees… focus on the high function areas (like driveways and pathways) to get the most bang-for-your-buck options.
Finally, see how you can decrease the costs of the fixtures. Most landscape lighting sellers have multiple layers of middlemen to go through to get you the best pricing… but at Bailey Street Home you get factory-direct pricing every day, bringing you the best quality landscape lighting at the absolute best price.
