First, you are going to take an mark off 12 and 18 inches off the sidewalk if it’s being mounted along a sidewalk or walkway path, reason for it is the fixtures cast a large diameter of light, so you don’t have to have the fixture right next to the sidewalk. You can put it actually in the landscape because the plant material is going to have and the fixture is going to have a downward coverage of lights over the tops of the plant material.
So, first if its rock or mulch you are going to push back the mulch or the rock in the area that you are going to be mounting the fixture into, then what we do is we make an X with the shovel. See, we go down about six to eight inches, then you are going to take and place the fixture, this being the front end of the fixture here towards the sidewalk. You are going to place the flat edge of the shovel on top of the lip on the ground stake. Then you push it down so that grade or mulch is going to be level with the bottom of the riser boot on the fixture.
Once you have gotten the fixture level, you are going to tap the soil around the fixture to securely mount it into the desired mounting application or location.
When you are burying your low voltage wire, this is the low voltage wire, when you’re burying the low voltage wire from the transformer, you run it right along the edge of the side walk. It’s very easy digging. You can just poke the cable right down inside there and pull the dirt right on over top there.
Now for making the connection, what we are going to be doing, you’ve got two conductors of wire here. We are going to separate the two about six to eight inches apart, then we are going to take the jacket off, of each conductor of wire and just split. Take about one inch of it off the jacket and then we are going to do the same thing with the jacket on the fixture lead wire. Then you take one-half of the fixture lead wire and one-half of the low voltage wire, wrap those wires clock-wise together like so, repeat it for the second side here. Now, you have your connection, and then you are going to take with the connector.
There is a notch with a circle on the bottom and just the notch; we are looking for the notch with the circle on the bottom. We are going to open up this perforated bottom with your pinky, and then you are going to push the wire in through the bottom of the connector and then fold it over the half and then with your left hand, you are going to hold onto the low voltage wires. Index and middle fingers, you are going to snap it into the connector like so..
Repeat the process here, and now we have our electrical connections done for that particular fixture. After you have got the electrical connections done then we are going to bury the connections. You want to keep these relatively close to the fixture. You don’t want to wild wire it and keep your connections along ways away from the actual fixtures themselves.
So, you can take and just move the dirt back and get that loosened up. Then you can dig just a little trench for the cables and coil those up. Once you have the dirt packed on around it, then you can put your mulch or rock back over the top of the exposed dirt. Then you are tamping the soil around it, making sure that your fixture is good and secure and level.
Here we are showing the Commino fixture in the raw copper, you can get raw copper in either Commino series or center stem series or Coppertino series, but it’s going to start out with this raw shiny-type finish here. This is a brand new raw copper Commino series fixture here and this here would be a three to four year old copper Coppertino series.
We do have an accelerator or a patina finish that we can spray on it, so it will look old right out of the box if you would like to do something like that.
Inconspicuous during the day, indirect and incredible at night.