Garden Lighting Installation, Wimbledon

The brief

The garden is around 25 metres deep with a patio area immediately behind the house and then a lawn stretching to a boundary wall. The client wanted: two double weatherproof sockets on the rear of the house for outdoor appliances and speakers, four ground-spike LED uplights positioned around a central tree and two planted borders, and a wall lantern above the back door on a PIR sensor. All cabling to be underground and the installation to be easily switchable from inside the house.

What we did

We started by trenching a route from the back of the house to a buried junction box roughly halfway down the garden. The supply cable is 6mm² SWA armoured, buried at 600mm depth with marker tape above it, running from a dedicated 20A RCBO on the consumer unit. This gives enough capacity to add further outdoor circuits in future without needing to run new cable from the house.

The two double sockets on the rear wall are IP66-rated and surface-mounted on weatherproof back boxes. They are wired on a ring from the armoured supply termination point in the garage. The PIR lantern above the back door runs off the existing external lighting switch in the kitchen — we swapped the old bulkhead for a clean wall-mounted lantern with an integrated PIR.

The four LED uplights are 3W units with a warm 2700K output — enough to make the planting visible at night without turning the garden into a floodlit car park. They are wired on armoured flex from the buried junction box, with each fitting on a 16A weatherproof plug so they can be repositioned if the planting layout changes. The whole system is switched from a single outdoor-rated timer switch installed internally, with a manual override for evenings when the client wants everything on.