Originally Posted by
evankirkhart
I have never done dimmed landscape lighting before either. I would generally recommend having multiple zones of landscape lights, so you can turn some sections off separate from others. But I have seen dimmable landscape lights before. You will need MR-lamp compatible heads (that would traditionally take a halogen bulb) and dimmable LED replacements (or halogens if you are crazy and enjoy changing light bulbs). The part I'm not super sure about is the transformer. You will definitely need something that doesn't have a built in timeclock. I have had success with VOLT landscape lighting, the price is right and the quality is good. You could try a transformer intended for indoor lighting, but the maximum distance will be severely limited, since most landscape light transformers have 12 volt as well as 15 volt taps (often more in between) BE WARNED that this is certainly unorthodox, and will probably (definitely) void the warranty of the transformer. It could very well hum, make weird noises, and/r fail prematurely. With a system like this, it is very important that you keep the voltage as consistent as humanly possible across all the fixtures, so you will need many circuits from the transformer, and utilize the multi-taps. Then you can quite easily hook your transformer to a Caseta PRO dimmer (good for MLV) and see if all this nonsense actually works. Connect the dimmer to a bridge and you are off to the races as far as astronomic timeclock events, remote access, etc. If you go to voltlighting.com you can check out all the different options they sell- just stay away from the integrated LED and the bulbs they will sell you. You will need to find your own. I have no experience with anything like this, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. It sounds like a much better idea to me to just add more zones of landscape lighting, that would achieve a similar end goal. I wouldn't sell this as a solution to a client, but would be willing to try it if they very clearly understood the risks and limitations. I would not bet more than $50 that this would work really well.