We had 3 flood lights installed about 100 feet up in our Beechwood trees that were installed by the previous owners. They were focused to light up the deck and house vs. being Landscape lighting. However, we wanted to light up our AMAZING Beechwood trees and that is the purpose of this blog post.

I started searching for many different solutions and trying to understand what would be needed. I started out by using some of the reviews on Amazon to get a good perspective of what kind of power that was needed. Many people were happy with the Topele lights so I ended up ordering them along with the electrical boxes.

Keep in mind, I needed line voltage (120V) unites. Which means, they are connected directly to my circuit breaker and a couple of wall switches. This seems to be more and more rare these days. Most manufacturers push everyone to buy the stand alone “packages” of low volt landscape lighting. However, when you want to light up an area as big as ours you need more power. Also, power consumption is not really a factor for us, (you may want to give that some consideration), as we won’t use these every night. Only if we are outside with a fire in the fire-pit or whenever we have guests over.

Here are the Amazon unite – the build quality was really nice. I can see them lasting for years.

I started off with ordering on Amazon a couple of lights to kick off this process. here are the units I ordered.

When I was at Home Depot to get two more connections for the insulated wire conduit to the electrical mounting box, I checked out a couple of the lights. Then I headed back home and got the Topele lights mounted. While they were pretty good, I wanted to get better lighting up the tree. Either way the units I already bought from Amazon will be put to good use. So I headed back to Home Depot.

While I was there picking up a couple of additional lights, I also searched around for something to make an extension mount. I was able to find a shower head extension arm. I used this to “mount” the new Home Depot lights. This helped to extend them away and get a better angle for the light to go further up the tree. You see, while you might think your trees are perfectly straight, you find out when trying to light them up – that they curve in and out all the way up. This extension helped to get the light further up the tree.

Here are the two units from Home Depot that I tried.

1. Line Voltage Bronze LED Landscape Flood Light 7W Metal w/ Spike
2. Dark Bronze Flood Light (as close I could find similar to the unit I installed)

The new landscape light had a much more focused beam with a light shield.

Overall these units were not up to the task at hand. They are more of a Flood vs. Spot light for close up landscaping. Let’s say for 75% of all jobs, the lights would fit the bill. For example, like lighting up your house, yard or smaller trees it would be no problem. However, in our case they are not up to the task of lighting up Beechwood trees at over 100 feet tall. Consulting with a local store, I soon found that we would need about 4-5,000 lumens (almost 4x’s the light in one of these units) to properly light up our trees.

The good news is that we can only improve upon the lights. All of the wiring checked out and is solid and will serve our purposes in the future nicely. So what is next?

1. Identify a powerful LED flood light for the task (I am thinking Flag pole type illumination power).
2. Light up the forest floor (I think I will turn the existing lights down from the same box on the tree).

Either way – we have the old wiring ready to go for which ever solution I find that works. Once the leaves come in any day now, we should be able to light them up. Just maybe if we are lucky, we will light up one of our owl’s that visits us during the night.

Have you used any Landscaping lights to brighten up your yard, house or trees? Let us know below what worked for you!

Until next time!