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I have been installing landscape lighting systems for over 10 years now as a part of home building and remodeling projects that I do. I have been in the past purchasing commercial grade transformers for durability and reliability. One system that we installed a couple of years ago had over 50 fixtures and used 900 watts of power. We installed a 900 watt transformer on this job, however it would fail at 6 month intervals. Even though the manufacturer would replace with a new one free of charge, the shipping and installing of a new transformer each time was costing me a lot of money as well as being frustrating for the client and us. So...
I decided to try replacing the one 900 watt transformer with 3 of these moonrays 300 watt transformers. And I can report that after over a year of service that they are still working great. Not a single problem running at their max rating of 300 watts. Several months ago we changed out the incandescent bulbs to LED's and now they are running around 250 watts on the whole system. Each of the 3 transformers is running about 83 watts. And they have been working great.
Last week the clients had a lightening strike near their home. It must have travelled thru the buried low voltage wire runs as we had a surge protector on the power line side of the transformers where they were plugged in. Over 30 of the fixtures had blown LED's. We ran an array of tests on the transformers and they were still working fine! I couldn't believe it. I am truly impressed with them. I am now using them on all of my jobs. With LED fixtures/bulbs becoming much more affordable, this 300 watt transformer is all we ever have to install even on very large jobs.
I do want to mention that the original ones that I ordered a couple of years ago had the photocell under the clear window to the left of the LED Indicator on the front of the unit. The Amazon photo still shows this same style transformer. The newer one no longer have the photocell in this location. Instead you can see a black and red wire at the old photocell location and now there is a 8 foot lead wire out of the bottom of the transformer with the photocell at the end of it. We usually mount our the transformer outside and the old style worked perfect for us, however this new style will allow you to mount the transformer inside or remotely within 8 feet of a sunlit location. We just coil the wire up and zip tie it close up on the under side of the transformer where it can still receive sunlight. This new design does allow greater flexibility of mounting options so it really is a better design. I hope the photocell holds up as well as the old ones do. I don't really see why they wouldn't. So far we haven't had any problems, but we have not tested the new design for over a year in operation yet.
2 more points I would like to make:
First is that there are only two screws on the underside of the transformer for you to connect your low voltage wire to. On the commercial transformers that we used to install there would be a bus bar that had pencil sized holes in it with captive screws coming up from underneath the holes to compress and hold the wires that were inserted into the holes. This would allow you to insert 3-12ga or 4-14ga wires into the hole easily and secure with screw. The way we work around attaching many wires to this transformer is by using 2 white and 2 black 12 gauge solid copper wires as pigtails. You can easily place the 2 white wires under either side of one of the screw terminals and the black wires on the other. Then you will have 2 neutrals and two hot pigtails that you can wire nut your low voltage wires too. We bend the pigtails up after installation so that the wire nuts are facing up and shed any water that may reach them.
Second is that on the commercial units you usually have stepped voltages on the bus bar. They would start at 12 volts and go up to 15 volts. You would then use the higher voltage outputs for longer runs of lights that were farther away or had more fixtures on them. This would allow you to even out the brightness levels of all your fixtures in your system. If you are running conventional incandescent or halogen bulbs then you may want to keep this in mind, especially if you have a landscape design that spreads out your fixtures at greatly varying lengths. This transformer has only one set of 12 Volt terminals.
LED lights have allowed us to make longer runs with smaller gauge wire and has virtually eliminated brightness variances. This transformer is a perfect fit for LED's. Also if you have a limited number of incandescent fixtures (10 or less maybe) and/or you have them run in parallel then this would probably work great as well.
In conclusion I will have to say that this transformer has exceeded my expectations and I have been very pleased with it. It has also dropping in price from &97 to $85 since I first purchased one over 2 years ago. This really is a great deal. Hope this review helps! Good Luck with your Landscape Lighting Project.
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Product works well, but had to internally repair both the units I purchased as the capacitor was loose and screws were bouncing around inside the unit.
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