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Wire & Connectors
Landscape lighting wire is also known as landscape lighting cable and is two conductors (two wires) in a rubber insulation. Lighting wire can be buried, left above ground, or even run underwater. The connectors available for lighting cable include wire nuts, cable splices, and special plastic connectors that screw together and can splice together multiple wires without stripping the insulation. Click on the links or pictures below to view all of our lighting wire or wire connectors.
Lighting Cable and Lighting Wire
The wire, or cable, used for low voltage landscape lighting is a direct burial insulated wire, usually two conductors. What this means is that there are two wires that are enclosed together in a rubber insulation to keep them separate. This lighting wire comes in various gauges, or thicknesses. The most common gauges used for 12 volt landscape lighting are the 8, 10, and 12 gauges. The wire is commonly referred to by its gauge followed by a hyphen "-" and then the number of wires or conductors. So you will commonly refer to them as 8-2, 10-2, or 12-2 cable or wire. 12 volt lighting cable is typically sold in 100, 250, and 500 foot rolls. So now when you hear someone refer to 10-2 direct burial wire you will know what they are talking about.
The direct burial part means that this wire can be buried as is, without any other conduits or covering. The lighting cable is completely waterproof and weatherproof, it can be left right on the top of the ground, hidden under shrubs or ground cover, buried in the ground, or even submerged underwater. When using submerged be sure that you do not make any connections underwater, unless you are using special underwater connector hubs. The different gauges of the wire have different uses. The lower the number gauge, the thicker the wire. Thus a 12 gauge wire is thinner than an 8 gauge wire. The reason the gauge is important in 12 volt lighting wire is that as the wire gets thicker, the resistance to electrical flow decreases. This is particularly important to 12 volt lighting systems because it is possible on long lengths of lighting cable that there will be voltage drop. Voltage drop means that although you may be delivering 12 volts to the wire at the transformer, by the time it reaches a fixture 100 feet away the resistance in the lighting wire has caused the voltage to drop to 9 or 10 volts.
Most landscape lighting systems are wired in a large loop of 12-2 or 10-2 lighting cable that starts and ends at the transformer. Each fixture in the landscape lighting system is connected to this main loop of lighting cable through lengths of lighting wire run from the fixture to the main loop. This lighting wire can be a thinner gauge. Most fixtures that we sell already have a length of lighting cable pre-wired into them, usually 14-2 or 16-2 gauge, eliminating the need to make a connection directly to the fixture. A lighter gauge wire such as this can be used here because only a single fixture is being connected to this wire. If the fixture is close enough to the main loop of landscape cable then only a single connection needs to be made. This type of connection is easily made with the special connectors that screw together, piercing the insulation of the wire to create an electrical connection. There is no need to cut apart the main lighting wire loop when using this method. If you prefer to use waterproof wire nuts to make the connection between the fixture and the main lighting wire loop then you will have to cut the main loop and join both ends of each of the main loop wires to the fixture wires, meaning you will use two wire nuts and each wire nut will have 3 wire ends in it. Waterproof wire nuts have silicone sealant inside them so that when the connection is made it will form a waterproof seal. We cover different ways to connect lighting cable in our Guide to 12 volt landscape lighting, or in the Transformer Installation Instruction Sheet. These guides and instructions can also be found in our Resources section.
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