5 Signs Your Outdoor Lighting Needs to Be Replaced

Old or failing landscape lighting is often worse than no lighting at all. Here are the five signs it is time to call someone.

1. Fixtures Are Turning Green or Pitting

Aluminum and plastic fixtures corrode. The green oxidation you see on aluminum fixtures is not cosmetic, it is a sign the material is failing. Once corrosion starts, it accelerates. Pitting aluminum lets moisture into the fixture and begins attacking the wiring connections. If your fixtures are green, cloudy, or visibly corroded, they need to go.

Brass fixtures weather differently. They develop a natural patina that is actually attractive, darker, warmer, and more refined than new brass. If you have brass and it looks dark or slightly weathered, that is normal and correct. If the fixtures are green, they are not brass.

2. Lights Come On and Off at Random

Intermittent operation, fixtures that work some nights and not others, or flicker on and off, is almost always a transformer or connection problem. The transformer is the box that converts your home's 120V power to the 12V the system runs on. A failing transformer or corroded connections at the wire splice points cause exactly this symptom. Left alone, it will get worse and can trip your circuit breaker.

3. Some Zones Work and Others Do Not

Low-voltage landscape lighting runs in zones off the transformer. If one zone is dark and the others work, the problem is usually at the transformer terminal or a failed splice somewhere along that zone's wire run. This is a diagnosable, fixable problem, but it requires someone who knows the system to trace the fault.

4. The Light Is Yellow, Dim, or Inconsistent

Older halogen landscape lighting produces a warm but dim, inefficient light that fades as bulbs age. If your system is more than eight or ten years old and uses halogen bulbs, the output has declined significantly from what it was when installed. LED retrofitting, swapping halogen bulbs for LED, is often the most cost-effective upgrade you can make to an existing system.

5. You Have Not Touched It in Years

Landscape lighting that has not been serviced, fixtures re-aimed, lenses cleaned, connections checked, transformer inspected, slowly drifts from its original performance. Plants grow in front of fixtures. Ground movement shifts aim points. Lenses cloud over. A system that looked great at install and has not been touched in five years is probably performing at 60 percent of its original quality.

If any of these describe your current system, contact us for an assessment. We service existing systems throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island and can tell you whether repair, retrofit, or replacement makes more sense for your property.