# Soffit/Eave House Lighting



## dipan (Feb 11, 2013)

I have read the DIY LED eave lighting posts on this thread and am interested in doing something similar, but will not be DIY'ing the lights. I have selected locations around our relatively large house for 25, 40, and 60 degree optic'd 3 watt Cree XPE powered prebuilt recessed lights and have installed some of them. The fixtures themselves are from superbrightleds and look well made and appear to be have a cast aluminum body. Pretty well sealed but not waterproof or anything, but should be reasonably protected from rain by the soffit and overlying roof/gutters. These will be primarily accent and slight intruder deterrent type lights. We also have floodlights that will be motion triggered if someone decides to walk up to our property.

Here is the fixture:







I have drilled 2.5" holes with a hole saw in the thin plywood eaves/soffits and installed several of these, but not powered them up yet. The attic work is yet to be done. The fixtures look very clean installed. As there will be 25 x 3 watts of these, I decided to buy a 150 watt power supply from them for some headroom:






This will be mounted in the attic and powered by an automated outlet so I can set on/off times and other triggers if I want. I will be using 12 gauge landscape wire in the attic with landscape connectors to tap into the long wire without cutting and splicing at each light attachment. What's nice about the fixtures and not specifically stated or pictured at the vendor's site is that the "tail" wire is pretty long, I'm guessing around 4 feet, so it should be easy to grab the wire from the eave from within the attic without having to solder on a longer wire.

Now I do have some questions about wire length. I bought 12 gauge wire to minimize voltage drop (12v DC power supply), and will try to limit runs to 100 feet without having a parallel voltage "reinforcing" run to keep the voltage up. Any advice as to how long a run I should be able to have? I will try to loop the wire back to the power supply to additionally reinforce the voltage. I bought 500 feet and I'm thinking I will probably need all of it but am not sure.

Feel free to ask questions or offer up any other suggestions.

Thanks ...


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## nathank (May 29, 2013)

I'm wanting to do this exact setup. Do you have all your lights wired and working yet? Can you show some example pics of the differences between the 25, 40 and 60 degree installed lights?
Did the fixtures turn out to be weatherproof enough for this application?


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