L-06.LI · Lighting & Irrigation
Low-voltage lighting laid out for the walk up to the door and the view back at the house, plus zoned irrigation that keeps new sod and new plant material alive through a Georgia August.
See it built
Sod and nursery stock go in with almost no root system relative to the canopy they are carrying. For the first season they depend entirely on consistent water, and a Northwest Georgia summer does not supply it consistently. It supplies three weeks of nothing and then two inches in an afternoon, which is the worst possible pattern for establishing turf.
Hand watering works for exactly as long as somebody remembers to do it, which is usually until the first holiday. Irrigation is what protects the investment in everything else that was just planted, and it is meaningfully cheaper to install before the turf goes down than to retrofit through it.
Lighting is a different argument. A property that has just had serious money spent on it is invisible for half the hours the family is home. Low-voltage lighting is the cheapest line on this list that changes how often the space actually gets used.
Irrigation starts with zoning, and zoning starts with the fact that turf and beds want completely different things. Rotors throwing across an open lawn and drip feeding a shrub bed cannot share a zone without one of them being wrong. Sun and shade split further.
Heads are selected and spaced for head-to-head coverage so there are no dry arcs, matched within each zone so precipitation is even, and set at the right height for what they are watering.
Backflow prevention is installed to protect the potable supply, and the system is set up so it can be winterised properly rather than left to freeze.
The controller is programmed for establishment first, which is a much heavier schedule than a mature landscape wants, and then handed over with instructions for stepping it down. An establishment schedule left running into year two produces shallow roots and fungus.
Lighting is low-voltage, with the transformer sized to the run and the fixture load rather than to whatever was in the van. The layout is done for two views: the walk up to the front door, and the look back at the house from inside it. Uplighting on structure and specimen trees, path lighting where people actually walk.
Both are quoted by the installation rather than by area, because the count of zones and fixtures drives the cost far more than the size of the property.
For irrigation: the number of zones, which is a function of how many different watering conditions the property has rather than how big it is; the water source and pressure available; and what the trenching has to cross. Established roots, existing hardscape and driveways all add.
For lighting: fixture count and transformer capacity, run lengths, and again whether cable has to get under anything finished.
The single biggest cost factor for both is timing. Installed during the landscape build, the trenching is already open. Retrofitted afterwards, it goes through finished lawn and beds, and that is most of the labour.
Dry arcs and brown crescents in the lawn, from heads spaced past head-to-head coverage or mixed types sharing a zone.
A bed on the same zone as the turf, either drowning or bone dry depending on which one the schedule was written for.
A system that was never winterised, discovered in spring as a cracked backflow assembly.
On lighting: glare instead of light, because fixtures were aimed at the viewer rather than at the thing being lit, and a transformer running at its limit so every fixture on the far end of the run is dim and yellow.
Where this work leads
Quoted by the each, line by line, after a site walk. Across 21 counties from the shop in Floyd County.