Why You Should Not Ask Your Landscaper to Install Your Lighting

Your landscaper is great at what they do. Lighting is not what they do. Here is what happens when you ask them to do it anyway.

The Most Common Mistake We See

Every few months we get a call that goes like this: "We had our landscaper put in some lights last year. They look terrible and half of them stopped working. Can you fix it?"

We can. But fixing it means pulling the old fixtures, re-running the wire, and starting the design from scratch. It almost always costs more than a proper install would have.

This is not a knock on landscapers. They are excellent at what they do. The problem is that lighting is a completely separate skill, and most landscaping companies treat it as an upsell, a way to add a line item to the invoice, not a specialty service they have spent years mastering.

What Actually Goes Wrong

The fixtures are wrong. Most landscapers source whatever is available at the supply house that week. You get unbranded aluminum fixtures with a brass-colored powder coat. They look fine on day one. After one New England winter, they are pitting, corroding, and failing. Real brass costs more. It also lasts twenty years without replacement.

The placement is wrong. Lighting placement is not intuitive. Where to put the fixture, at what angle, how far from the wall, how to account for seasonal plant growth, these are decisions that take years of nightly installs to develop intuition around. A landscaper who installs lights twice a year does not have that intuition. They follow a rough formula, and the result looks like a rough formula.

The system design is wrong. Voltage drop, transformer sizing, wire gauge, zone layout, all of this has to be calculated correctly or the system fails in ways that are expensive to diagnose and fix. A landscaper who is not doing this every day is guessing.

There is no real design. A lighting specialist produces a plan before touching your property. Every fixture gets a position. You approve it. The install follows the plan. A landscaper shows up with fixtures and figures it out as they go. You have no idea what you are getting until it is already in the ground.

The Accountability Problem

When something breaks six months after your landscaper installed it, who do you call? Lighting is one of many services they offer. When something breaks six months after a lighting specialist installs it, you call them and they come back. Their entire business is built on long-term relationships with homeowners. They have a warranty to honor and a reputation to protect.

We offer a written lifetime warranty on every install. If a fixture fails, if a splice corrodes, if a zone goes dark, we come back and fix it. That is easy to stand behind when the install is done correctly in the first place.

What to Do Instead

Ask your landscaper about plants. Ask your irrigation company about water. Ask a lighting specialist about lighting. The properties that look the best at night, the ones that look like the photos in magazines, are the ones where someone who does nothing but lighting made every single decision.

Request a free design plan from BrightNest. We will send you a mockup of your property with exact fixture placement and a line-item quote. No obligation. See what a specialist would actually do with your home.