Low-Voltage Landscape Lighting and Lawn Lighting: A Survey of the 50 States. Installation of low-voltage landscape lighting is simple and safe. It is practically impossible to suffer a serious injury from contact with a current lower than 30 volts. The laws that apply to electrical installations are primarily established and enforced by states and vary considerably.
In an effort to catalog applicable laws, I conducted a comprehensive survey of all 50 states. Some states that require electrical licenses don't exclude low-voltage work in their statutes, but when asked, they say they ignore this work and allow it to be installed by people without a license. There are also cases where certain types of low-voltage installations are exempt from licensing, such as telecommunications or alarm work, but there is no mention of low-voltage lighting; some of these states assume that lighting is included in the exemptions; others do not. Local municipalities may have their own licenses that may or may not affect low-voltage installation.
The cataloguing of these local laws was beyond the scope of this survey. Survey Results Of The 50 States, 24 (plus Washington, DC, C). Of these, 11 have a specialized license for low voltage. These specialized licenses require less training and experience than is required for a teacher or officer's license.
Provide a feasible (albeit uniformly arduous) path for non-electricians to seek legal facilities. One frustration among contractors seeking these licenses is that the experience and testing required is almost entirely focused on indoor electrical work, jobs that require learning a large number of electrical codes that are never applied to garden lighting. The remaining 14 states of these 24 states require an electrical contractor, officer or master electrician license. These states effectively restrict the installation of garden lighting to electricians.
Green industry professionals can work with these electricians on lighting projects, but the potential for benefits is greatly reduced. The author is director of communication and marketing at CAST Lighting, Hawthorne, N., J. For a single-family home, adding items such as individual plants or even new grass can usually be done without a permit. Along with landscape lighting, mulch, borders and other gardening elements.
Especially if you do it yourself. The best landscape lighting customers are sophisticated and high-income consumers: they recognize a quality company and always choose it. This group is currently working with legislators to amend electrical laws and exempt landscape lighting from licensing. In the absence of a healthy number of garden lighting businesses, many consumers choose to make their own lighting, buying inferior products in local home improvement stores.
In conclusion, this author is of the opinion that licensing for the safe profession of landscape lighting only serves to create unnecessary barriers and restrictions, barriers to entering the profession and restrictions on practicing it. The new law includes a subsection that states: “A person who installs low-voltage landscape lighting containing a factory-installed electrical cable with plug that does not require installation, wiring, or other modification to the electrical wiring of a structure may do so without holding a contractor's license. Trends favor electricians Low-voltage landscape lighting is a relatively new profession that has grown tremendously over the past two decades. Larger industries have healthy coffers to support legislative change, but landscape lighting has only a handful of important players.
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