What actually fails on a coastal lighting system
Coastal San Diego lighting fails at the connections, not the fixtures. Salt air corrodes aluminum housings and pierce point splices within two to three seasons. We install brass fixtures with silicone filled direct burial connectors and set transformer taps so every fixture reads at least 10.8 volts at the socket.
Last updated: August 2026
A homeowner off Neptune Avenue in Leucadia called us because half her path lights had gone dark and the rest were the color of a dying flashlight. The fixtures were four years old. She assumed the LEDs had burned out.
They had not. We pulled six splices out of the mulch and every one of them was a pierce point connector packed with green oxide. The copper had corroded through inside the plastic. That is what 400 yards from open water does to an unsealed connection.
Housings: brass against everything else
Aluminum and composite fixtures are fine inland. In Cardiff, La Jolla, Del Mar, and anywhere within a mile of the beach, the socket housing pits, then water wicks in, then the lamp fails and the next one you install fails faster because the socket contacts are already gone.
Brass patinas and keeps working. That is the whole argument.
| Factor | Brass | Aluminum or composite |
|---|---|---|
| Fixture cost | $120 to $250 | $40 to $90 |
| Coastal service life | Long, patinas rather than pits | Often 2 to 4 seasons at the socket |
| Socket corrosion | Rare when sealed | Common in salt air |
| Refinishing | None needed | Powder coat chips, then it goes |
Why do LED landscape lights go dim instead of just dying?
Voltage drop. Low voltage systems run on 12 volts nominal, and every foot of wire eats a little of it. A long 12 gauge run with eight fixtures hanging off it can arrive at the far end well under 10 volts, and LEDs respond to that by going dim and shifting color rather than switching off cleanly.
We wire in hub layouts rather than daisy chains, upsize to 10 gauge on anything past about 100 feet, and use the 13, 14, and 15 volt taps on the transformer to bring the far end back up. Then we meter each fixture. Target is 10.8 to 12 volts at the socket.
Somebody who does not own a multimeter should not be selling you a lighting system.
Connections are the whole job
Every splice we make is a silicone filled direct burial connector, buried with slack so a future repair does not mean pulling the whole run. Pierce point connectors save about 30 seconds each during install and they are the single most common failure we find on systems built by other crews.
Wire gets buried 6 inches minimum, deeper where a gardener runs an edger. We keep runs out of planting beds that will be turned over, and we route around irrigation laterals rather than across them.
What a coastal system costs
A 12 to 18 fixture design for a typical Encinitas or Del Mar backyard runs $2,800 to $6,500 installed, with the transformer, wire, and metering included. Retrofitting an existing failed system usually costs more per fixture than a fresh install, because we are demolishing someone else's wiring before we can start ours.
Adding lighting during a build is cheaper than adding it after. Wire goes in while the trenches are open, before the pavers are set. On a finished patio we are either coring or going around.
We design at night
Evan walks every lighting property after dark before we lay anything out. Daylight tells you nothing about where the shadows fall, which tree has enough structure to uplight, or how much your neighbor's floodlight is already washing out the side yard. HOA rules in Rancho Santa Fe and parts of Carmel Valley also cap fixture brightness and spill onto adjacent lots, so the layout has to account for that before it gets priced.
Details on fixtures and layouts are on our landscape lighting page, and lighting work in coastal builds shows up in the project gallery.
The Leucadia yard got brass, 10 gauge on the long run to the back property line, and sealed connectors. Nine months of marine layer later, every fixture still meters above 11 volts.