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What You Need
- Ultra-slim 6″ LED Pancake Lights, found HERE.
- NM-B 14/3 Wire, found HERE.
- 2″ Hole Saw Bit
- Jig Saw
- Hand Saw
- Touch Up Paint
- Ladder
- Smart Light Switch, found HERE.
What Had Happened Was…
While hubby has a background in electrical and is more than qualified, he explicitly stated that he did NOT want to put in the downlighting. He was 100% on board with someone else installing the downlighting. Each quote, I was told the same thing, the height of our roofline and the lack of attic access was driving up the cost, to the tune of $1500! The height of our roofline would require two technicians to safely install and the installation would be an all day ordeal, since nothing was accessible from the attic. At this point, we were getting ready to scrap the whole project. Then one technician mentioned there was quite a bit of attic space in one corner, a corner that just happened to be in the backside of the closet right where we need the attic access. Can you see where this is going? Not to get too wordy here, we will share the attic access project in a separate post.
How We Installed The Down Lighting
Most houses have those blinding flood lights on the corners that conveniently point into neighbors’ windows or oncoming traffic. After our corner flood light got hit with a stray tennis ball one too many times, it was no longer working and gave me a perfect excuse to upgrade (*cough* remove *cough*) the lighting situation.
Remove the Existing Light
Safety first! Turn off the breaker!
The flood light had a few screws that needed to be removed and then some wires clipped. When you clip the wires, make sure you clip as close to the light fixture so you have as much slack as possible to install the new pancake lights. Patrick is using a jig saw and trimming out the hole left by the light fixture, it was too small in diameter for our 6″ LED lights.
Prepping For Light Install
The LED lights came with a template circle to trace where you plan to install the lights. The template was very helpful since we didn’t use a 6″ hole saw. We were able to drill out 2″ sections with the bit we did have and then smoothed out the rest with a jigsaw. At this point, Patrick also ran the 14 gauge wiring. He put a stretch of wiring in the attic between each light, so that all four lights were connected to the corner where the original floodlight was installed (wired in a series circuit).
A quick side note here about the size of the LED down lighting we chose:
Most single story houses will look fine with a 4″ diameter light. However, our house has a steep elevation change making our roofline closer to one and a half stories from the ground. Given the higher roofline and wanting to maximize the illumination in our black hole of a front yard, we went with the bigger diameter light. This decision also affected the hole saw bit, as well. The standard is a 4″ diameter. We could not source a reasonable 6″ diameter hole saw bit locally, so we punted with a 2″ diameter hole saw bit and a little clean up work with a jig saw and hand saw. This approach also required a little touch up paint. All that to say, if you choose a 4″ diameter light, your process is likely going to go much smoother than ours!
Installing the Downlighting
The wiring on the fixtures was a first for us and perfect for someone teetering on the top of a very tall ladder. The black housing has quick connect wiring, the stripped ends of the wires are simply clipped into the red quick connectors. No twisting wires together with wire nuts! All the wires and connectors are then enclosed inside the black housing.
When installing the light, there are 4 color options. Make sure all the lights are set to the same hue! We went with the 4000K setting, the 5000K looked too blue against our house and the 3500-2700K all looked yellow against our brick.
See those arms on that ladder? Patrick got a ladder stabilizer, HERE is the one we have. He says this purchase was long overdue and made him feel much less wobbly while he was up at the roofline. If you’ve got uneven terrain or need to get pretty high up on an extension ladder, he would strongly recommend this add-on.
We are at the half-way point — two installed and two to go! That first light on the far corner took about 4 hours of fiddling with because what you can’t see is that light is TWO stories off the ground, with a terraced flower bed under it, meaning no great spot to anchor a ladder. The good news is each light afterwards took under 30 minutes a piece. Make sure you plan to spend a full day on this project.
Final Touches
We decided to go with the smart switch for 2 reasons: 1) The light switch is buried in the cobwebbed depths of our garage, and 2) The light switch we chose has an app we can control from our phone. That’s an all around win in our book! You may have noticed that we didn’t actually use attic access to install the lighting. Ok, that’s not entirely true, we had to get in the area to run the wiring. BUT we had anticipated spending a lot more time in the attic for this installation and used that to justify cutting a huge hole in the backside of one of our closets. Like I said earlier, that is a whole other can of worms.
Ta Da!
Project Breakdown
- LED Lights $89.97
- Light Switch $29.97
- 14 gauge wire $68.21
TOTAL (+tax) ~$205
Our original quote was $1500. By installing the lights ourselves, we were able to reduce the project price by almost $1300! None of this was super complicated, but it was rather daunting cutting holes into our soffits. Getting over the fear of messing up was THE hardest part of this whole project. We figured the worst case scenario is we would be calling the professionals back in to fix our mess. Well worth the risk, don’t you think?
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Great post! It looks great. Thank you for sharing this…I’m adding this project to my husband’s list lol .
Awesome! Tell him to hit up Patrick if he has any questions. We were both surprised with how easy the project was to figure out. Not saying there wasn’t frustration and expletives, ha, but when we were finished we were pretty proud of ourselves!