Mood lighting

Flying off to an island vacation is on everyone's to-do list. If you're lucky you may find yourself basking on a sandy beach under a hot noonday sun,  perhaps every couple of years or even once every year.

For all of the rest of the summer evenings and weekends...I decided to put the resort just on the other side of the patio door. 

Even when the weather isn't cooperating, as in this picture taken on a rainy night, the view out the window is still able to make you pause for a moment just to admire it.

As for the creation of the system that makes this possible, well I’m sure there were many simpler ways to have achieved lighting a back yard but what would be the fun in that.

Perhaps it’s a personal quirk of mine but I like to have lighting options  when I install lighting. Control is key. The ability to illuminate only one area or everything. A path, a boundary, a mood or to feel secure. Solar powered landscape lighting is convenient to install but difficult to create zones that are on/off depending on the effect you want.

Enter my “overkill” approach. I say that in humour but admit it may be true. I’ll digress for one moment here and again stress that learning and pushing oneself to try something outside of their comfort zone or wheelhouse is, in my opinion, essential. So I sourced and built a power supply/switcher to support the vision I had of selectively illuminating different areas of the landscaping.

A unplanned benefit to what I came up with is that I can control more than just lights by using relays that are controlled by the 12V DC system but then power 120V AC pumps or transformers or anything else I can get a wire to.