The final touch to a beautiful yard or garden is lighting. It brings a whole new nighttime world to your home, plus you don’t lose the beauty of your features when the sun goes down. One thing you might be concerned about is the power consumption. It’s easy to add lots of these lights around your yard, but how much electricity is it going to use?
Below we will discuss and test landscape lighting wattage, explain how to work it out for yourself, and calculate the total electricity required.
How Many Watts is Landscape Lighting?
The average landscape lighting system uses between 20 and 100 watts. This is the overall power consumption for most domestic systems. An individual light uses 5W to 10W and a backyard system will use 6 to 10 of these lights.
The exact number depends on the size of your system and model of your landscape lights. For example, a set of six 5W lights uses 30W while a set of ten bright 10W lights uses 100W.
The reason for this difference is quite simple. The brighter the light the higher the wattage. The more lights you install, the greater the overall power draw.
The good news is most of these devices use LED bulbs so the total electricity consumed is never extortionate!
How to Find Out Your Landscape Lighting Wattage
There’s 3 ways you can work out the wattage of landscape lighting.
- Check Product Specification
The quickest way is to look at the landscape lighting’s specification. The watts (W) is usually written on a sticker on the base of the light. If not, you can check the user manual or the manufacturer’s website for technical details.
- Use a Wattmeter
A wattmeter is brilliant for getting a live wattage reading and tracking total energy usage of any appliance. You can simply plug it into your landscape lighting to get instant information.
I used one to test a landscape lighting system which gave a live reading of 47.8W.
- Wattage Formula or Calculator
If you know the amperage and voltage of your landscape lighting you can use this to find the maximum watt rating. Simply use the formula Amps x Volts = Watts. Or you can head over to the ‘Watt Calculator’ to work this out.
Landscape Lighting Wattage Examples
Let’s take a look at specific examples of how many watts landscape lighting draws. Below is a collection of modern landscape lighting with their listed power ratings.
| Landscape Lighting Model | System Power Rating (Watts) |
| ZUCKEO Low Voltage Landscape Lights | 60 |
| EMONG Low Voltage Outdoor LED | 18 |
| LEONLITE 12-Pack LED Landscape Spotlight | 48 |
| VOLISUN 6pack Spotlights Outdoor Landscape Lighting | 18 |
| SUNVIE Low Voltage LED Landscape Lights | 120 |
| SUNVIE RGBW Low Voltage Landscape Lighting Kit | 120 |
| Lumina LED Landscape Lighting Waterproof 6 pack | 24 |
As you can see, the power ratings vary between different landscape lightings. So you should take the time to check your own appliance.
How Much Electricity Does Landscape Lighting Use?
You can use landscape lighting wattage to work out how much electricity it uses. Plus this can be useful in understanding how much it costs to run your landscape lighting.
A watt (W) is a measurement of power at a single point in time. A watt-hour (Wh) is the total amount of electricity used in an hour. For example, landscape lights drawing 60W would use 60Wh when running for an hour.
Happily, electricity bills are recorded in kilowatt-hours (kWh). A kilowatt is simply 1000 watts. So a 60W landscape lighting running for 1 hour uses 0.6kWh.
In reality, you use landscape lights for 4 hours an evening. This means a medium sized lighting system uses about 240Wh or 0.24kWh electricity a day. That’s 7.2kWh a month and 87.6kWh a year.
That’s a rough electricity cost of $0.036 a day or $13.14 a year to light your backyard for 4 hours every evening.
Using Landscape Lighting Off-Grid
If you’re planning to use your landscape lighting in an off-grid situation like a power outage, remote cabin, RV, boat, or similar, the information above is useful. It enables you to pick the correct power products and know how long everything can run.
My first tip would be to use solar powered garden light. They have no worries about power supply. They’ll charge through the day and light up at night.
If you need a more reliable system, you can either use a power inverter, portable power station, or generator to generate AC electricity.
To make sure everything runs smoothly you should check two things on this equipment – wattage capacity and total energy capacity.
Your power source, like an inverter, should have a wattage capacity of at least 20% more than your landscape lighting. This ensures it will be able to deliver enough power as they are never 100% efficient. A 200W power source should do the job for most LED domestic systems.
Secondly, you need to ensure your energy source, like a battery, has enough energy to run the landscape lighting for the required amount of time. As we already know, it could use about 60Wh electricity an hour. This is the equivalent to 5Ah on a 12V battery.
How Many Watts Does Landscape Lighting Use Summary
I hope you now understand how many watts landscape lighting uses.
There is no doubt that adding lighting to your yard brings it to life in the evening. It’s ideal to create a relaxing ambiance and brighten pathways. Power consumption is always a worry these days especially as your lights will run for hours every evening. The good news is that LED bulbs make them very efficient. Even a large home system won’t use too much electricity but you should still expect a small rise in utility bills over a year.
