Garden Lighting & Outdoor Electrics

Power to garden rooms and outbuildings

Garden rooms, home offices, summer houses, workshops and garages all need a proper supply, not an extension lead run out through a window. A permanent supply means an armoured cable buried at the correct depth or clipped along a suitable route, terminated into a small consumer unit in the outbuilding so it has its own protection and can be isolated independently.

From there the building is treated like any other part of the installation: sockets, lighting, and a supply for heating if it is going to be used year round. One recent job on this site ran a supply roughly forty metres down a garden to a new summer house, which is a fairly typical distance, and one where cable sizing genuinely matters, because volt drop over that run has to be calculated rather than guessed.

Garden lighting

Outdoor lighting divides into a few jobs that do different things:

• Path and step markers. Recessed low-level LEDs that make a route safe to walk without lighting the whole garden.
• Tree and planting uplights. Spikes or recessed uplights aimed into foliage. The single most effective thing you can do to give a garden depth at night.
• Decking and border lights. Small recessed fittings set into decking, steps or retaining walls.
• Wall lights and up-downs. Fitted to the house or boundary walls, throwing light both ways for a strong architectural effect.
• Colour-changing LED. Where a garden room or seating area is used socially and the colour is part of the point.

All outdoor fittings need an appropriate IP rating, RCD protection, and cable routed and buried so that future digging does not find it the hard way. Garden lighting is usually best circuited separately from the house so it can be switched or timed on its own.

Outdoor sockets and EV-adjacent work

A weatherproof external socket is one of the cheapest additions that makes a garden genuinely usable: for a mower, a pressure washer, a hot tub supply or festoon lighting. These are fitted with an IP-rated enclosure and RCD protection as standard.