The Installation of your lighting can make or break your scheme.
Exterior lighting
If the lighting system is going to last, it has to be carried out correctly therefore, there is a huge amount of work involved and most of it is unseen.
On new projects, we supply ducting plans and these are vital for a discrete lighting scheme. On top of this, ducting future proofs your lighting system, allowing cables to be pulled in at any time and makes maintenance easier. Ducting allows us to install cables anywhere into your garden and keeps disruption to a minimum.
In mature gardens we don’t lay cables on the soil surface, these are always buried into slit trenches. We take great care not to damage the roots of trees and shrubs. If there is a root in the way, we will go underneath it. We are there to illuminate your garden, the last thing we want to do is to damage your plants.
All of our low voltage cables are buried to a minimum of 300mm and mains SWA (steel wire armoured) cable to a minimum of 500mm. It is rare that we do not bury cables as our installations are all about being discrete. Moreover, if your cables are not buried, your lighting would be susceptible to damage by foxes, gardeners, squirrels, mice etc.
Our lighting systems are all extra low voltage and each light has its own supply direct to the junction box, meaning that if there were any issues, only one light would go out and it would not affect anything else. Additionally, there will be no nuisance tripping and it is completely safe.
We don’t mount our junction boxes on wooden stakes as these eventually rot and are quite often ‘on view’ which distracts from the beautiful plants. We place our junction boxes into small access pits, which are buried just below the soil surface but allow us to access the connections at any time to carry out maintenance and install more lights if required.
For larger installations, we use feeder pillars to mount our drivers into so that these are accessible but importantly, dry. We always install feeder pillars discretely, once again these should not be on view. Ideally, we place all LED drivers into a dry environment such as a shed, garage, basement, comms room etc. This means that the control equipment is kept dry and once again, it means we can access the equipment easily for maintenance.
Our exterior systems stand up to the UK weather and last.
Interior lighting
As with exterior lighting, we go out of our way to make the installations as discrete as possible and in general, it is much easier inside. If it is a new build, then installing light fittings is very straightforward although this still needs to be thought through with careful planning and execution.
If it is a lighting installation into a decorated property, this of course can be tricky however, our experienced electricians investigate ways of taking cables to the new lights and take great care to install the fittings with the minimum of disruption.
Our installations conform to the latest IET 18th Edition regulations plus we are members of the NICEIC.
Controls
We can work with any system from a straightforward switch on a wall to sophisticated controls such as Crestron, Lutron, Rako etc. More often or not, we supply and install remote controls which can also be used in conjunction with an app via a smartphone or tablet.
We can combine the remote controls with electric gates, garage doors, water features etc and if required these can be switched via sensors or timers.
We would love to design your lighting project and if you would like to discuss this further please contact us via the website, or email design@moonlightdesign.co.uk or 020 8925 8639.
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