Voltage Drop - Lumenesk - Simple Garden Lighting

What is Voltage drop?

Voltage drop is an issue where the voltage slowly becomes weaker as the line of garden lights get longer...

Voltage drop varies due to many different circumstances (Length of the cable, the thickness of the cable, the amount of lights connected etc etc) but if you keep your system to the 40m mark then our lights will still perform well.

Please Note: Our Fairy lights don't like voltage drop, they must always be installed close to the driver to work well. unfortunately if they are towards the end of a long run of cable they will be very dim and may even turn off. The following picture is a visual representation of how garden lighting is affected by voltage drop

A quick example is a set of garden lights 50m long, the first light which would be the closest to the driver would get the full output of the driver, in this case 12volts and would burn at its brightest. As the cable get longer and longer the voltage would slowly drop to the point where at the 50m mark the voltage might be down to 8 or 9 volts. Lumenesk choose their globes very carefully and we only use globes that can still provide great brightness even though the power has weakened, however all globes will get to a point where they diminish in their light output.

If you need to run the lights longer than 40m then there are a few tricks we have to try and help the system perform....

Use the HD Cables for the long runs. Our HD Cables (Heavy Duty) have a larger inner core that can help deliver more voltage which in turn reduces voltage drop.
Use our 150watt driver, it has a 13.5volt output instead of the standard 12volts, this gives us a 1.5volt increase to combat any loss further down the line.
If you have a long run of garden lights 40 - 50m long, you will end up with a lot of connectors along the run. these connections can also contribute to voltage drop. One solution is to run a heavy duty line down to the mid point in the system and then connect lights from that point. The diagram below shows how this works.