Those Darn Lighting Vandals

Vandalism. Wreckage. Damage. No one likes to see it, especially at your own home.

But it’s out there. The perpetrators seem to seek out and destroy landscape lighting systems with gleeful passion. They work unseen, sometimes over our heads, often at night, but they leave a path of destruction in their wake.

Who are they? The real culprits might surprise you.

Of course, there are the neighborhood kids who accidentally crash into things on bikes, skate boards, or in cars – like mailboxes and lighting fixtures. Or the ones that seem to enjoy tearing things up using feet, hands, bats, and boards to wreak havoc on systems that are in the public domain like parks and neighborhood entries. This creates a lot of costly damage, busting path lights, up lights, wash lights and so on. But human vandalism is actually minimal in our experience.

However, the worse culprits we find are those creatures with more than two legs!

Let’s first talk about the ants. Here in the south we have an abundance of fire ants. These pests love to build dirt mounds over and around ground mounted light fixtures. They are attracted to the heat that these fixtures generate at night, and they find the warm area to be quite cozy, to say the least. Once covered by a mound of dirt, heat builds up in the fixture and causes it to fail. Ants also get a charge out of invading the transformers of low voltage systems, and junction boxes of line voltage systems, and the resulting damage can be expensive to repair. Luckily, there are several options available to control these boogers.

Then there is the beloved family dog whose favorite game is digging holes in the yard. Fido finds this nice low voltage wire about 6” deep in the lawn or flower bed and decides that it is in his way. The determined pooch then decides that chewing the wire in half will take care of the problem. Although this can be repaired, the only prevention here is to train the pup not to dig in the yard. This will also benefit the rest of your grass and landscape!

Now these mischievous villains do their share of destruction to outdoor lighting systems, but they are lightweights compared to the pros. These little furry scoundrels live in trees, steal the bird’s food every chance they get, and plant seeds that grow into new trees all over your landscape! Yes, that’s right - it’s the cute prankster rodents known as squirrels. These pint-sized monsters are nearly as destructive as the bandit-looking raccoon - which we’ve never actually had a problem with as far as lighting goes, but we have plenty of other stories about those darn critters. We all know squirrels can get into your attic and chew the wiring there causing dangerous short circuits and possible fires! If you hear noise in your attic, do NOT ignore it. So when it comes to your landscape lighting wiring, they do the same thing. The biggest issue they cause is chewing the wire high up in trees where moon lighting fixtures may be installed. Believe it or not, we have some creative ways to limit the damage these wicked rascals create. We are somewhat limited about what we can do about the wire going up the tree, but by attaching the wire on the side or under the limbs, we can at least make it more difficult for them to chew the wires.

These are just a few of the things that we look at when we perform a maintenance check on any outdoor lighting system, besides the lighting operation itself. If we can catch these issues early, we can usually avoid more costly repairs.