Installing garden lighting: record what you bury
Published:
Installing garden lighting is rewarding: an afternoon of work, years of pleasure. The part almost everyone skips takes five minutes — recording where the cable runs.
The job itself is not the problem
Most garden lighting runs on a 12-volt system: safe, simple, doable yourself. Lay the cable in a conduit — it protects the cable and makes later replacement possible without digging.
Working with 230 volts? Then depth and cable-type requirements apply and this is work for a certified installer. That is not a formality: a damaged 230V cable in wet ground is dangerous.
The problem comes later
The cable you bury today is registered nowhere. A KLIC report will never show it. In five years someone plants a shrub, in ten someone places a fence — and the spade knows nothing.
Most severed garden cables are severed by the owner who buried them. Not out of clumsiness — out of forgetting.
Recording it in five minutes
Photograph the open trench before closing it — with the facade or another fixed point in frame. Measure the distance from that fixed point at two or three places. Note the depth.
Then put the route on your property map. In ErfPlan you draw the line, attach the photos, and see it sitting there at every future job. Today’s chore, the next twenty years’ convenience.
ErfPlan is a reference map for personal use — not a replacement for an official KLIC report and not a legal survey tool. Digging without a report where one is required remains at your own risk.