Low voltage LED lighting designed around the live oaks you already have. Installed by a Boerne crew, rated 5.0 by 74 homeowners.
Almost every property we light in Boerne, Fair Oaks Ranch and the northwest side of San Antonio has the same best feature, and it is not the house. It is a live oak that has been standing there for eighty years with a canopy forty feet across and a trunk that splits into three at head height.
Two or three well aimed uplights under one of those trees will do more for how your house looks at night than a dozen path lights ever will. The canopy catches the light and becomes a ceiling, the trunk and the limb structure become the shape, and the whole front of the property gains depth instead of a flat wash. It is also the cheapest dramatic move available: three fixtures and a run of cable.
So the order we work in on most properties is trees, then the architecture that is worth showing, then the paths people actually walk, and then nothing else. The single most common problem we are called to fix is a yard with too many lights in it, all at the same brightness, which reads as an airport rather than a garden.
A fixture at or below grade aimed up into the canopy. This is what makes a live oak dramatic, and it is what we use on trunks, stone facades, columns and specimen agaves. Two or three fixtures around one tree at different distances give the canopy depth. One fixture straight up the middle gives you a flashlight.
The mistake to avoid is glare. If the beam is visible from the porch or the street at eye level, the fixture is aimed wrong or needs a shroud. You should see the lit tree, not the light.
Fixtures mounted high in a tree, aimed down through the branches. The light falls through the canopy and lands on the ground in a pattern of leaf shadow that looks like a full moon. It is the most natural looking light you can put in a yard, and it lights a patio or a lawn without a single fixture visible at ground level.
It costs more, because somebody has to get up the tree, run the cable neatly and mount the fixtures in a way that will not girdle a limb as it grows. On a big oak over a seating area it is worth every dollar.
Useful and overused. Path lights are for the places where somebody actually needs to see their feet: a limestone walkway with an uneven joint, a step down, the turn from the drive to the front door. Spaced 8 to 12 feet apart and staggered, not lined up like runway markers at 4 foot intervals.
A wide, soft beam across a stone or stucco wall. Grazing means putting the fixture close to the wall and aiming steeply up, which throws the texture of limestone into relief. On the flat stucco of a lot of newer builds, a soft wash is better than a graze, which will show every trowel mark.
Everything we install runs at 12 volts through a transformer, not at line voltage. That is what makes the cable safe to bury at a shallow depth, and it is why adding a fixture in three years is an afternoon rather than an electrician.
The parts of the job that decide whether it still looks right in year five are the parts you cannot see.
Transformer sizing. Add up the wattage of every fixture, then size the transformer with headroom, because you will want to add fixtures later and because running a transformer at its limit shortens its life. A stainless or powder coated multi-tap transformer with 12, 13, 14 and 15 volt taps lets us compensate for voltage drop on the longer runs instead of accepting dim fixtures at the end of the line.
Wire gauge and voltage drop. This is where most cheap installs fail. Push 12 volts down a long run of undersized cable and the fixtures at the far end arrive at 9 or 10 volts, which reads as visibly yellower and dimmer than the ones near the transformer. We size the cable to the run and split loads across zones so every fixture in the yard lands within a tight voltage band and they all look like the same light.
Connections. Every splice gets a waterproof, gel filled connector. Twist-on wire nuts wrapped in tape are the single most common reason a landscape lighting system starts dropping fixtures after two rainy seasons.
Colour temperature. We stay warm, in the 2700K range, and we keep it consistent across the whole property. Mixed colour temperatures in one yard is the tell of a system that was added to piecemeal, and cool white LEDs on a limestone house look like a car park.
The fixture body is where the price difference between a system that lasts fifteen years and one that lasts four actually sits.
Cast brass is the standard we recommend for anything permanent. It does not corrode, it takes the heat and the sprinkler water, and it weathers to a dark patina rather than failing. It costs more per fixture and it is the reason a proper system is not cheap.
Cast aluminium is a reasonable middle ground when powder coated well, though in irrigated beds the ones sitting in wet decomposed granite are the first to go.
Plastic and thin stamped metal fixtures, the kind sold in kits, are a false economy in this climate. They chalk and crack in the UV, the lenses cloud, and the integrated LED means that when the light fails you throw the whole fixture away. We get called to replace them regularly, usually about three years after they went in.
We also prefer fixtures with replaceable lamps over sealed integrated units wherever we can, so a failure in year seven is a bulb rather than a dig.
Typical installed ranges, not a quote. Landscape lighting is priced per fixture plus the transformer and the cable run, so the number moves with how many fixtures the property needs, not with the square footage of the yard.
Lighting is the one service on this site that we genuinely recommend doing in phases. Start with the trees and the entry, live with it for a season, then add. It is a low voltage system, so adding later is straightforward as long as the transformer was sized with room to grow, which is why we size it that way from the start.
Uplighting if you want the tree itself to be the feature, which is the usual answer for a live oak in a front yard. Downlighting if you want the light on the ground under the tree, which is the better answer over a patio or a seating area. On a large oak, doing both is not overkill.
Most front yards land between 8 and 14 for a first phase. Two or three per significant tree, two or three on the architecture, a handful on the walkway. Fewer, better placed fixtures beat more.
Barely. LED landscape fixtures draw a few watts each, so a whole system is comparable to leaving one old incandescent porch light on. The transformer and the timer or photocell do the rest.
Not at the levels used in landscape lighting, provided the fixture is not mounted tight against bark where heat can build, and provided anything mounted in a tree is attached in a way that can be loosened as the limb grows. We use hardware that accommodates growth rather than strapping a fixture to a branch and forgetting it.
Usually yes. The first thing we check is the existing transformer capacity and the cable gauge, because most retrofit problems are a transformer already at its limit or a run that is too long for the wire in the ground.
Deer will knock over a badly staked path light on their way through, and in Boerne they go through. We set fixtures on longer stakes in compacted ground and keep path lights off the routes the deer already use, which is usually visible in the yard if you look for it.
A photocell and timer at the transformer is the simple, reliable answer: on at dusk, off at a set hour. Smart transformers with a phone app are available and we install them, but the failure rate on the electronics is higher than on a plain photocell.
Somewhat, and better than a floodlight does. An evenly lit front yard with no deep shadows is a harder property to approach unseen than one with a single bright light casting black shadows everywhere else.
The oaks are the feature. We plant around them.
Limestone walls and walkways are what wall wash is for.
Design and installation from an office 8 minutes from Main Street.
No charge and no salesperson. Someone comes out, looks at the yard, and tells you what it needs. We work in Boerne, Fair Oaks Ranch, Helotes and northwest San Antonio, Monday to Friday from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM.
28991 IH-10 W, Suite 104, Boerne, TX 78006
travislandscapingtx@gmail.com
