Just like a car, maintenance for lighting will always be ongoing. It starts with preventative measures.
Plant Placement
Where you place your new plants, flowers & greenery can have an effect on the performance of your lights. Be careful not to place new plants in front of or too close to your lighting fixtures. Sometimes it can be easy to forget that the small plant you just put in your garden won’t be small forever. Plants can quickly over grow and obscure your fixtures.
Trees
When you have a down light mounted in the tree, its best to have your lighting specialists come relocate it for you. If the tree is cut down without removing the fixture first, the fixture could be damaged.
Make sure that your fixture placement is allowing for eventual tree growth. If your fixtures are located too close to this type of tree, they will be enveloped by tree branches in just a year or two.
Keep LED Lamps Dry
The biggest threat to your landscape lighting system is moisture.
If moisture somehow enters the fixture, it needs to be addressed right away. Putting this off can eventually lead to water build up and corrosion inside the fixture. Water damage will lead to failure of an LED lamp faster than anything else.
Moisture can be detected by the presence of a small amount of condensation on the inside of the lens.
Retrofitting LED
This is the best kind preventative maintenance! Retrofitting your old halogen system with an LED upgrade. Halogen lamps burn out every year or so and will have to continually be replaced. LED bulbs are different. You will most likely have to replace an LED lamp after 15 – 20 years.
Annual Service
Having Custom Lighting of America’s team come out once a year to service your system is a highly recommended preventative measure.
They will check the entire system, including:
- Transformer – timers set correctly, blocks securely fastened, photocells and line balances checked.
- Fixtures – lenses will be scrubbed and scraped clean, vegetation will be trimmed back and cleaned up.
- Each LED is examined during the annual maintenance service. If one is found faulty (if it has a burned out diode or other issue) it will be replaced under its warranty.
- Wire – All exposed wire reburied.
Why Servicing Your System Is Important
Servicing your system and keeping it maintained is the key to ensuring that you will continue to enjoy it. If you wait a long time or just simply keep putting off servicing your system, it will require a lot more work and time to get everything back to the condition it was in when the system was first installed.
If you think your landscape lighting system is in need of a tune up or servicing, call Harold at 561.204.3000 or fill out our consultation form here. One of our lighting experts will do a free consult and evaluation on your lighting today.
