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DIY electrical Challenge- outdoor lighting extension but maybe more can be done ??

masculinist · 2016-01-20 16:04:07

There was an outdoor Halogen light above my back door for years. The glass was cracked and it was well due to be replaced. The old plastic outdoor junction box was severely weathered and broken too. So I replaced the Halogen light with a low powered LED lamp and replaced the plastic junction box with a brand new one with…

20-01-2016 4:04pm

#1

masculinist

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There was an outdoor Halogen light above my back door for years. The glass was cracked and it was well due to be replaced. The old plastic outdoor junction box was severely weathered and broken too. So I replaced the Halogen light with a low powered LED lamp and replaced the plastic junction box with a brand new one with plenty of sealant behind it [pictured in the attached images].

It all works very well now. I wish that box was straighter but I was reusing preexisting holes which were not my doing and it seemed pointless to drill a new hole just for that.

Inside the plastic outdoor box is a heavy duty connector strip. This is simply a plastic array of places where wires can be connected to each other easily. So each load wire [earth,live and neutral] is connected to ts corresponding live wire. So far so good.

I am very happy with the job so far.

However, I would ideally like to have lights in the left and right hand sides of the garden too,not just above the back door.

So what is thought about my also connecting in on either side two low powered led PIR lamps which would make three overall ?

The old Halogen bulb must have been 120 watts or more. It used to get very hot.

This new LED stays cool and is 7 or 14 watts [I think] so 3 of those or two lower powered leds in parallel doesnt seem to be any significant load compared to what was there before.

If this sounds reasonable, can anyone recommend an easy way to connect those LED lamps in parallel ? If I site two more junction boxes to wire each new lamp into , what sort of cable should I run between them exposed to the elements ? One will be just around a corner and 2 metres away. The other will be on the same back wall and 4 metres away.

Those connector strips can be fidgety and definitely wont be happy if I connect any more of those thick wires in the same terminal, it was a tight squeeze already so is there some other type of connector strip which can take one input and connect to 3 loads ?

Now a completely different question. I have seen security cameras which communicate back to the owner over wifi. Would it be possible to connect this into the circuit ?

Any ideas about this project would be very welcome

ps with the unfortunate DDOS attacks on Boards lately, this thread was a serious pain in the proverbials to get posted. So please excuse any small errors due to the fact that it would take hours to edit even a tiny mistake.

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