Commercial Outdoor Lighting Maintenance

Why lighting schemes degrade quietly

A landscape lighting scheme is at its best the week it is commissioned and gets worse from there unless somebody maintains it. Very few properties do.

Fixtures fail individually, so the scheme dims gradually rather than going dark. Nobody notices a single fixture out. By the time somebody does notice, several are out and the pattern of light has changed completely.

Planting grows in front of fixtures, which is the second cause. A light installed to graze a wall is inside a shrub two years later.

Fixtures get knocked out of aim by maintenance equipment, and connections corrode. None of it is dramatic and all of it accumulates.

Lighting fails one fixture at a time, so nobody notices until the whole scheme has changed.

What a lighting maintenance visit covers

A proper lighting check happens after dark, which is why it so rarely happens. A daytime inspection tells you almost nothing about whether a scheme is working.

The visit covers lamp replacement, re aiming fixtures that have moved, cleaning lenses that have clouded, cutting back planting that has grown into a beam, and checking connections and transformer output.

Group lamp replacement is worth considering on larger schemes. Replacing all lamps at once, on a cycle, costs less in labour than dozens of individual call outs and keeps colour consistent, since lamps shift as they age.

The setting nobody checks

The most common lighting fault on a commercial property is not a failed fixture. It is a timer running the wrong schedule.

Sunset moves by several hours across the year. A fixed timer set in June leaves a property dark for an hour in December, or burning lights well past dawn in summer.

A photocell or an astronomic timer solves it, and both need occasional checking. A photocell that has been shaded by growth or covered in dust switches at the wrong time or not at all.

This is the cheapest fix in landscape lighting and the one most often left. Checking the schedule twice a year costs nothing and prevents both the dark evenings and the wasted daytime running.