First – and most critical – is that these timers are usually designed to be used indoors only. Moisture, insects, dirt and other elements of outdoor use cause these timers to malfunction regularly. Another reason to avoid sub-standard timers is their inability to handle power outages. These timers must have electricity at all times or they will lose time and programming. You’ll notice the system not turning on until well past dark, or staying on during the day when this happens. Also, a manual timer will not automatically adjust for seasonal changes in light and darkness. It’s not fun having to constantly adjust the timer to keep up with the daily time of sunset or Daylight Saving Time.
Controlling a high quality lighting system should be almost effortless for the property owner. There are a number of ways to accomplish this, and we use a lot of them - but we never use mechanical timers. One of our favorites to use is an astronomical timer. This timer is set to operate according to your actual location, using your longitude and latitude settings. This allows the system to operate only from dusk to a specified time or dawn, and automatically adjusts each day. This is far better than a photo cell since it’s not affected by shade, clouds or debris on the lens. The timing system works completely automatically, even for Daylight Saving Time, so there’s no need to make any manual adjustments. Additionally, the astronomical timer has a battery back-up eliminating failure even if the power goes out (the timer, not the lighting). Another control device, universal powerline bus/radio frequency, allows us to operate the landscape lighting and the home’s exterior lighting together as a unified system. The program will permit us to dim the home’s exterior lighting to the same levels as the landscape lighting, creating a lovely, uniform lighting scheme across the project, operating from dusk to any selected off time. This UPB/RF system is programmed and then managed from almost anywhere in the world using an IPhone, IPad or IPod Touch as a remote controller.
The main point here is that we want the operation of the lighting system to be as effective and efficient as possible. We don’t want lights to be on when not needed, and we don’t want anyone to be forced to constantly deal with the inconvenience of making adjustments all the time. These professional control devices may cost a little more than a big-box mechanical timer, but will easily pay for themselves by reducing energy waste turning the lighting system on unnecessarily. The effectiveness of a quality timer also ensures that your lighting system will work when you want it to without wasting your time with the inconvenience of manual adjustments.
Like they say, timing is everything and we like to help everyone save time and money.
