Landscape lighting transformer repair. How to add a dusk to dawn sensor to a landscape transformer.

hey guys welcome back to the shop I've got a small homeowner project that I want to take you through here I've got a landscape lighting transformer that was

damaged as a result of a nearby lightning strike a few weeks ago and rather than just replace the entire unit I'm going to replace a small component

the dusted on sensor went bad so I'm I bought an external one and I'm gonna mount it to the outside of the landscape lighting transformer case and get the

unit back in service again so stick with me and I'll show you how I do it

[Music] [Music] all right before we get started with the repair I wanted to go over a couple of

items that you might want to either purchase or borrow from a friend or a knowledgeable person that you know maybe give you a hand and when I was

originally contemplating on making this video I thought wow this is a real simple video anybody should be able to do this well sort of because I think

most mostly you would have to have a meter this is going to help you identify where the problem is with this

particular unit and make it so that you can prove that you've fixed the issue also I mean if you're gonna if you're

gonna own a home you really need to have something like this so that you can troubleshoot things around your house make sure that your whatever you're working on electrically is safe making

sure that you've hooked things up the right way before you you know burn up you know expensive components or whatnot

so for what I paid for this I think that every homeowner should have something similar to this maybe not necessarily an

ant meter but definitely a volt ohm meter you can get those all day long at Harbor Freight or borrow one or you know

whatever so that would be the probably the most specialized piece of equipment for this repair that I would think that you would need to have secondly a couple

of screwdrivers to get into the case and take it apart Center punch to work your location on the metal case to drill hole

hole saw yeah I guess these are kind of specialized you can get them in a kit they're really useful for lots of the things they drill through metal and and and wood and and plastics and stuff that

you a real good job at that this is a step bit you can use that to drill through the case although you will need another regular bit steel bit a bit to drill through the case first to

get the hole started this doesn't do a good job at starting holes it doesn't really nice job at finishing them to the size that you want and it rounds off the the outer edge so it's not a sharp pair

of wire strippers I like wire strippers better than anything else to strip wire because well that's what they're designed to do and you get the best results you know you

don't tear up the wires some wire nuts and a cordless drill or corded drill whatever you have I think that about covers it let's get started with the

repair okay so first things first with this you know take the unit apart and I want to verify that the transformer is

good I the first thing that that I observed when the lights didn't come on was the the sensor and display here was

dark and changing the settings up and down did not yield any results as far as turning the power on to the to the

landscape lighting so I figured that probably the controller itself was bad so you know before before I even went he further than that I went inside and

tried to find an exact replacement part for this unit here and I was couldn't can't find anything no no parts for any

of this stuff so taking this apart here which I've already gone through the motion of removing all the screws and

things like that I determined that this controller here which has a relay on it and some

capacitors this all by itself is what controls turning on the the lights this

controls the transformer so what I've decided to do was eliminate this and

wire directly to the power and in

between that use a dusted on sensor I picked up this dusted on sensor on

Amazon it was six or seven dollars basically this is going to act as the switch in between the power input and

the transformer so this is the output this is what hooks up to the landscape

lighting cabling and this is the input

from the 120 volt AC the transformer is

a 120 volt to 12 volt AC transformer so this item right here is going to work perfectly for that but it's going to

involve some modification to the case itself so going back to the the part where you would identify whether or not

the transformer is bad I'm gonna show you how to do that basically what I did

was we're going to pull off the input wires well just we're gonna eliminate

this altogether because this part here is absolutely it's no good so that's

gone basically what I'm gonna do is wire directly to the transformer and of course it goes without saying you're

gonna want to do this without anything being plugged in there's a couple of wire nuts to make it a little safer

and then we'll go ahead and plug in the transformer now I'm going to test the output as you can see

twelve point five volts AC on the meter so this transformers good now for me this was a good time to when I took this

apart to take this outer case and just kind of clean it up and hit it with a couple coats of spray paint this is the sensor it's all plastic I guess that's

okay it's not gonna rust what I need to do is I need to drill a hole in the side of this case here

so this mounts on the side now to keep

it so that the paint stays decent and put a couple layers of this blue tape on

it keep the metal shards from scratching the paint I'm choosing to put this in this area

because there's nothing in this space here and he used a center punch so my drill bit doesn't wander off

[Music] the rubber gasket is gonna go on the outside okay the instructions for this

particular switch states that the black input hot wire gets connected to the

black wire of the switch which is the dusted on sensor the red wire from the

dusted on sensor connects to the black wire on the transformer and then all of

the white wires get connected together the common one thing I like to do with

with wiring it especially wiring when you have to use a wire nut is to you is to strip back the wiring at least an inch

usually that won't that all that wire will not fit in inside a wire nut but

once you get it twisted you go back in and clip off the end

it's tight okay everything's wired back together we've got it plugged into the power and I've got my test leads

connected to the output of the transformer meters hooked up to simulate

this to simulate this working what I'm going to do is just cover up the sensor

here and it takes a couple of seconds there's a built-in delay so it doesn't kick on and off on and off but you can

actually hear a slight click when this

turns on there we go twelve point five volts let go of it let the light hit it

there goes soft so just a couple of other things that I wanted to cover with this if you're if you're going to do this project to repair one of these landscape transformers the best thing to

do is to do a little bit of research and make sure that you're buying the right dust add-on sensor because the entire

current is being run through this device here and if this transformer it exceeds

the rating on your sensor switch it's going to overload it and it's gonna it's gonna break it's not going to work so

for this one here I chose this one which was up to 1800 watts so this is only a 300 watt transformer this switch is

going to work just fine well I've got everything back on the wall-mounted and a few minutes to test it make sure that was working good so

thanks for watching and we'll catch you

on the next video

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