Advanced options
LED garden lighting is cheap to RUN (a whole 20W string costs pennies a night): the money is in the buying and any electrician work (outdoor sockets/armoured cable: GBP 150-300 if you don't have outside power). Solar's honest deal: free to run, nothing to wire, but winter output collapses exactly when evenings are longest: solar is a summer product. Old 300W halogen floods are the one genuine running-cost villain: swapping to LED pays for itself in a season.
What The Garden Lighting Calculator Works Out
- Running cost: the scheme's total watts x hours on per evening x 365 nights, divided by 1,000 for kilowatt-hours, multiplied by your rate, which defaults to the current Ofgem price cap unit rate. A 20W LED string-and-spots scheme on for four hours costs about 2p a night and under GBP 8 a year; old 300W halogen floods cost around GBP 115 a year for the same hours.
- Solar vs mains honestly: solar is free to run and needs no wiring, but a December stake charges through two dim hours to glow faintly at teatime. It is a summer product; mains LED is the year-round answer, and most gardens land on a hybrid.
- Design per pound: uplighting two or three trees is the biggest transformation per fitting, light the paths you actually walk, use warm white 2700K everywhere, and put the scheme on a dusk timer or smart plug.
- Custom wattage and price (advanced): pick the custom option and enter your own scheme's total watts and fittings cost. Add up the rating on each lamp or the transformer's output.
- Nights per year (advanced): many schemes run on a dusk sensor every night; others only come on for summer evenings. 180 nights covers April to September.
- Electrician cost (advanced): outdoor sockets, armoured cable and RCD protection cost GBP 150 to GBP 300 where outside power does not exist, and outdoor electrics are Part P work for an electrician. Low-voltage plug-and-play systems avoid most of it.
- First-year and five-year totals (advanced): fittings plus any wiring plus electricity, showing how small a share running cost is once LEDs are involved.
- Swap to LED (advanced): the yearly saving from replacing your scheme with an LED one of the wattage you enter, and the payback on a GBP 300 kit. For halogen floods it pays back within a season; for an LED scheme there is nothing to gain.
- Dusk timer saving (advanced): the value of trimming the hours lights burn past bedtime each night, and how quickly a GBP 15 timer repays. Shielded, downward-aimed, warm and timed is also the dark-sky and wildlife-friendly specification.
- Per month (advanced): the yearly cost and kilowatt-hours averaged across twelve months.