Why most garden lighting fails within three years

It is almost never the lamp

When a garden lighting scheme stops working, people assume a bulb has gone. In our experience it is far more often the connection, the cable, or the fitting itself giving up after a couple of British winters. Garden lighting lives outdoors, in water, in soil, through frost. Very little of what is sold for the job is actually built for it.

The four failure points

Almost every failed installation we are called out to comes down to one of the following.

• Indoor-grade fittings used outdoors. An IP rating on the box is not the same as a fitting designed to sit in a flower bed for a decade. Look for solid brass or 316 stainless steel, not painted aluminium.
• Unprotected joints. Every connection below ground or below water needs to be properly sealed — resin or gel-filled, not a connector block in a plastic box.
• Undersized cable. Run low-voltage cable too far on too small a conductor and the voltage drops. The fittings at the end of the run go dim, then the drivers fail early.
• No maintenance. Gardens grow. An uplighter perfectly aimed at a young tree is aimed at a trunk three years later, and lenses silt up with soil splash.

What good looks like

A well-built scheme uses fittings with a genuine warranty behind them, joints made to last as long as the cable, conductors sized for the run rather than for the price, and a service visit once a year to re-aim and clean. None of that is exotic. It is simply what the job requires, and it is the difference between a garden that looks right for a decade and one that is half-dark by the third summer.