Garden step lighting

Having fallen over the steps up our front garden onto the driveway once too often I decided that some lighting was needed. We don’t have streetlights and the old eyes are not what they once were (thinks of days before glasses...). I didn’t like the classic PIR activated front lights and spent some time looking for an alternative. In the end it was whilst doing something unrelated that I found some nice blue LED’s with a narrow viewing angle from Rapid Electronics (01206 751166). Because of the narrow viewing angle and bright intensity these made nice little lights.

   Click the image for a larger view (95k)

Anyway, it took me a day and a half to make the circuit board for distributing power (inc. 470 Ohm resistors) and the entire ancillary bits like conduit etc. I used cat5 to get power to the distribution box and (hang my head in shame) bell wire to connect each LED. The LED’s are soldered onto the wire and then heat shrink of two different sizes applied to try and weather proof them a bit. I also wired in a Dallas 1820 temperature sensor whilst I was at it. The LED’s are simply pushed into a drilled hole in the wood step supports. So far they have survived frost, snow rain and a little bit of good weather.

A HomeVision output port and a relay control the whole step lighting on/off process at dusk and about 11pm.

I used blue LED’s to illuminate the step below and green LED’s to indicate where the step edge is. The green LED’s also point upwards so they don’t show very well on the picture. With the benefit of hindsight the green ones are not needed but I am not going to remove them – too much effort. The whole thing draws about 320ma which is acceptable.

This page last updated on 9^th February 2001