Outdoor and landscape lighting that survives a BC winter

Outdoor lighting gets bought in July and judged in November. By the time it’s dark at half past four and raining sideways, you find out whether the install was done for the climate or done for the photo.

The Lower Mainland is a hard environment for outdoor electrical. Constant moisture, freeze and thaw, and cedar debris in every fixture housing. Here’s what actually lasts, and where the decisions are.

Low voltage or line voltage

This is the first fork and it decides most of what follows.

Low voltage runs at 12 volts through a transformer that steps down from your house supply. It’s what most landscape lighting uses: path lights, garden uplights, fixtures tucked into planting beds. The cable can be buried shallow, the shock risk is negligible, and you can add or move fixtures later without much drama. For anything in the garden, this is usually the right answer.

Line voltage is standard 120-volt wiring. It’s what you want for anything that has to be genuinely bright or genuinely permanent: soffit and eave lighting, wall packs, floodlights, security lighting, an outlet on the deck, a garage or shop. It needs proper burial depth in conduit, weather-rated boxes, and GFCI protection.

Plenty of properties end up with both. Line voltage handles the building and the driveway, low voltage handles the planting.

Where the transformer goes, and why it’s oversized

For low voltage, the transformer is the part people get wrong. It has to be somewhere weather-protected and accessible, fed from a GFCI-protected circuit, and sized with real headroom over the total wattage of the fixtures.

Headroom matters because of two things. Long cable runs lose voltage along the way, so the fixture at the end of a hundred-foot run sees less than the one nearest the transformer and reads visibly dimmer. And you will add fixtures. Everyone adds fixtures. A transformer chosen to exactly match the original layout is a transformer you replace in year three.

Fixture ratings are not marketing copy

Outdoor fixtures carry a rating for the conditions they can handle, and the distinction between damp location and wet location is the one that matters here. A damp-rated fixture is fine under a deep covered porch. Put it on an exposed wall on the North Shore and it fills with water.

Anything exposed to direct rain, anything in a garden bed where sprinklers hit it, and anything at ground level needs a wet-location rating. In-ground fixtures need to be rated for burial and installed with drainage, because a well light that sits full of water is a well light that fails within a season.

The cheap kit fixtures are where this bites. They look identical to the good ones in a photo and they cost a third as much, and the difference shows up when the housing corrodes through and the gasket lets go. Buying quality fixtures matters more outdoors than anywhere inside the house.

The wiring details that decide whether it lasts

Burial depth and conduit. Line-voltage runs go at code depth in appropriate conduit. This is the part that’s expensive to redo, because redoing it means digging up whatever got built on top.

Drip loops and sealed penetrations. Every point where a cable enters a fixture or passes through a wall is a place water tries to get in. Correct sealing, and cable routed so water runs away rather than into the connection, is most of the difference between a five-year install and a fifteen-year one.

Proper connectors. Low-voltage connections in the ground need connectors made for direct burial. Twist-on wire nuts wrapped in tape are a common shortcut and they fail, usually in the second winter.

GFCI protection. Required for outdoor circuits, and the thing that protects someone handling a fixture in the wet. Worth knowing that a GFCI tripping outdoors is often water in a box rather than a faulty device, which is one of the patterns we described in why does my breaker keep tripping.

Yes, new outdoor circuits need a permit

Adding fixtures to an existing outdoor circuit is maintenance. Running a new circuit for outdoor lighting is new electrical work, and that means a permit and an inspection, the same as anything else. Whether your city issues it or Technical Safety BC does depends on where you live, which we mapped in who pulls your electrical permit in BC.

It’s also worth having the wiring inspected before the landscaping goes back over it, for the obvious reason.

Control, and not annoying your neighbours

Photocells switch at dusk and dawn with no thought required. Timers or a smart controller give you more say, which matters if you want the path lights on all evening but the uplighting off at eleven. Motion sensing suits security lighting and is a bad fit for anything decorative.

One thing worth being deliberate about: aim fixtures at what you want lit, not at the sky or your neighbour’s bedroom. Shielded fixtures and a lower output than you’d guess usually look better anyway. Landscape lighting reads as expensive when it’s subtle and cheap when it’s blasting.

Do it while the ground is open

The cheapest time to run outdoor lighting is during other work. If you’re doing a patio, a driveway, a deck, or any real landscaping, get the conduit and the sleeves in while the ground is already open. Adding them afterwards means cutting into finished hardscaping.

We plan this alongside lighting and renovation jobs regularly, and the properties where it pays off most are the ones with real ground to cover. The larger lots around West Vancouver and out through Langley are where the run lengths and the transformer sizing actually need thinking about rather than guessing.

The short version

Low voltage for the garden, line voltage for the building. Buy fixtures rated for the weather you actually get. Oversize the transformer. Get the conduit in while the ground is open. If you’re planning outdoor work for spring, ask for a quote now and we’ll get the wiring sorted before anything gets covered up.