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Sunflower
Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2025
Because we have some very dark woods, I ordered this Moonrays 120 watt weather resistant low voltage transformer to install some landscape lighting. I am not embarrassed to say I am a novice when it comes to electronics but I thought because it had two terminals, that meant you could run two different strings. This was further compounded by the “location 1” on the screen. Turns out, it will only handle one string so you will have to be strategic how you string the lights together. I had hoped to run two pole mounted lights on one part of my driveway and then run landscape lights in another section. I can but I will need a lot more cable than I purchased to install everything.So, for those of you who are not savvy like me, you can run as many lights as you want up to the max output. In this case, it’s 120 watts total and my landscape lights are 6 watts a piece. As you can see, you can run quite a lot on this unit. I also appreciate it has an astronautical timer on it. This is a lot more accurate for dusk to dawn than just setting a time since it is always changing. For $59, I think it’s a great deal, even if the rubberized screen protector did come scratched.
MWZ
Reviewed in the United States on January 18, 2025
This power supply is somewhat specialized. Its not easy to program but allows true dusk to dawn, or dusk to a fixed time possible without an outdoor photo sensor.I've got quite a few landscape power supplies. My yard is large and broken up int several parts that aren't easily interconnected. I've got this one lighting a fairly small area to light part of a path, and the landscape around our pool house.This one does something I haven't seen before, which is to run the lights on a schedule based on celestial time. This would allow mounting it indoors and still have lighting that follows the season. It also allows programming a fixed off time with either celestial or photo sensor. I like this feature. I have similar power supplies that will turn on at dusk, and then turn off after a fixed time, 2, 3, 6 hours etc. That's OK, but what I really want is on at dusk then off at a fixed time regardless of season. This one will do that with either the photo sensor or celestial timing.The down side to the sophistication is the complexity of programming. The instructions could be better, they cover too much detail without a simplified quick start for the most often used cycles. The instructions inside the lid were easier for me. In any case it's pretty important to keep the instructions. You have to select a nearby city then select a number (53 in my case) to get the celestial time right. Without the instructions it would be impossible! Also for this reason the power supply needs to be mounted where its easy to get to. Mine is too low on a wall to directly program so I left enough slack to detach it for programming..Finally 50 Watts is a suited to my needs but might be lacking in some installations. At 3 to 5 watts per LED light, I'd keep it do about 7 or 8 fixtures depending on the wattage. This wouldn't be enough for some areas of my yard. It would be pretty easy to use this as a controller for a large dumb supply with a solid state relay though.All in all this is a reasonable way for me to fill in an area. Its complex to program though. An app could make it a lot easier. But its a reasonable price for a 50 watt supply and most people will only have to program it once. Its easy enough to plug it in next to an easy char and program before installing it. It does remember the programming after being unplugged.
Jeff
Reviewed in the United States on January 10, 2025
I got this landscape transformer to use with a bunch of LED low-voltage landscape lights. My old transformer (Hampton Bay, circa 2009) served me well, but like many older digital transformers for landscape lights, imposed a strange requirement: the first light HAD to be incandescent, and it HAD to be a minimum of 10 feet away from the transformer. As a result, I was forced to make sure I had an incandescent light almost a decade after my other lights had all been upgraded to LEDs, and had to keep 10 feet of wire coiled up, because the first light was approximately 2 feet away from the transformer.The Moonrays transformer imposes no such rules, and works fine. I have a 2-foot wire connected to the transformer at one end. Its other end is connected in parallel to a pair of 6-watt LED lights with 2-foot cables and one end of a 6-foot cable. The 6-foot cable's other end is connected to another pair of 6-watt LED lights.For the sake of comparison, the exact same wiring configuration left my OLD (Hampton Bay) transformer unable/unwilling to start... it would flicker on for a fraction of a second, then shut off. I *think* it's because old-type transformers required a minimum load to remain 'on'.The Moonrays transformer's ability to calculate the arrival of dusk (rather than having to directly observe it with a photocell) is handy as well. My old transformer was "digital" enough to allow it to be triggered on by a photocell, then remain on for a fixed duration of time using a timer... but like many aspects of its operation, it was kind of flaky & prone to getting triggered by afternoon Florida rainstorms. With the Moonrays Astronomical timer, you can configure it to completely IGNORE the photocell, and instead CALCULATE the sunset time for your location. If one of the predefined locations isn't quite right, you can refine it by a few minutes to reflect how far east/west you are of its calculated location.The timer functionality also allows you to configure it to turn on a second time overnight. I *think* its purpose is to allow you to turn the lights back on an hour or two before dawn... but you can also use it to compensate for the fact that it otherwise insists upon turning off the lights no later than 12:59am, by programming it to turn back on at 1am, then off again at 2am (or later, if desired).
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