Customer Reviews

Moonrays 95540 Low Voltage Path Lighting Kit with Power Pack

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Like others have stated with these type of lights and systems, is you get what you pay for. Don't get me wrong, they are not horrid, but by no means are they a great system. The problem with Moonrays is the connection. It is made at the light bulb base where there are two pins under the base that pierce the cable. The problems are: The cable that comes with this unit is a very small gauge (18 Gauge is what is supplied despite the picture showing 16 Gauge). In order for the pins to hit the wire when the cable is pieced they have to be perfectly aligned. I learned from other reviewers and just bought some 14 Gauge wire instead, which gave me the desired thickness of copper to work with while maintaining flexibility when trying to bend the wire and push the pins into it. To keep the transformer on to check each connection I simply used a small piece of electrical tape over the sensor. I used a small nut driver to push the cable up into the light base pins while using the base of another (screwdriver) to hold the top part (where the light bulb goes) into place. Also contacts for the bulbs come very close together, are easily bent. If the bulb doesn't light after some manipulation of the bulb, pull the bulb base off, look at the wire and likely you'll see the perforations were off kilter, though with the 14 or 12 gauge wire this should not be a problem. Use your screwdriver to bend the pins in the proper direction and try again (but don't push the cable up into the housing with anything that will conduct electricity if you still have the transformer on. Having a voltmeter handy is nice, so if still the bulb doesn't lite, you can check the voltage across the bulb contacts. On a couple of mine it was hard just to get the bulb to contact properly and that's what was wrong even though the cable connection was good. Don't stake any of the lights down until all are connected and all are lit.

Once you get the idea of what your doing on the first light, the rest are quite easy to install. Unplug the transformer... install light, plug in to check if it works... repeat until finished.

Now all this works great for the pathway lights, the spot lights are another matter entirely. What a major pain in the butt to get installed. The major problem with the spot lights is there is no cam (the little thing that in the pathway lights, helps to keep the cable connected to the pins) for use in these. You push the pins and cable together, and attempt to set the "correct" angle for your spot lights, and place in the ground, the problem comes that if you Move the angle in which the spot light is set in the slightest without some major coordination of moving the cable along with it, the pins will come right out of the cable and your back to square one. Major flaw in setting these up. Setting up the two spot lights took longer than setting up the pathway lights.

So only 3 stars for this product, minus one star for the crappy 18 gauge wire they sent, and I had to go out and buy 14 gauge wire. Minus another star for the shoddy spot lights.

Otherwise, it was a fairly simple set up. I haven't had any problems with my transformer blowing yet, so do not know as to the longevity of the product.

If anyone knows of a link to finding decent / equivalent LED's for these lights, please let me know. Getting into Lumens / mCd vs Watts is a whole other story.

The pack includes 10 lights and 2 spot lights. I find these as better lighting than solar lights which wanes after a bit. Have set the 10 lights up a month ago. They give out a nice warm glow around our yard. I gave up on the 2 spot lights. As the previous reviewer mentioned, I just could not get the pins to stay connected to the wire and the wire to stay in place - there was nothing to hold the wire in place with the pins - unlike the other ten lights for which you can actually screw the wire tightly into place with the pins.

I initially tried one lamp indoors to make sure it works before I actually took the entire pack outside. You just have to invert the power box face down so the sensor is covered to make lamp light up to test if it works.

Thereafter I assembled all the lamps and positioned them around the yard and laid the wire out to get an idea of where I should actually assemble the lamp because once you fix the lamp to the cable, I would not personally advise removing them and trying again several times as the pins puncture the wire. One thing to keep in mind is that the wire has to make contact the pins in one particular direction. Polarity is the key factor here. If you think you have fitted/pushed the pins through the wire correctly and the bulbs do not light up, then just flip the wire over and try again.

Overall, love the soft lighting and hopefully lasts longer than solar lights. -1 star for the lousy spot lights and -1 star for the setup. Would've preferred a easier way to set up these lights but I guess you get what you pay for.

I bought this through Amazon. This is the third type that I have bought. This was by far the easiest one to hook up. Also, with the connection taking place as it does, it is less likely that the wires will become disconnected when accidentally hit as some of my others have. The only down side is that the power supply did malfuncation after about 3 weeks. However, after I contacted the company (not through the number included in the package but one I found on the internet), they sent me another power supply that had a higher voltage. Since then, no troubles.

The number included with the material is just an office number not very helpful with my problem at all.

this product is totally NOT GOOD because the wire they manufacture for this product is NOT GOOD it has very small strended wire inside that the pins of the lighting are very short to touch wires ,so you buy this lighting and call electrician to install waste money rip everything and buy new wires cost me triple,I DONT RECOMMEND TO ANYBODY.

One of the units worked after initial setup, The other one just didn't work. Not sure if its the product or the seller. Within few weeks, both stopped working.

45 days after hooking up with only 10 days in service power supply died. All the other components were pretty good but that's where it ended. The most important part is the part that failed. I guess I can use the wire for a dog leash or something.

the power source gave out after two months and the spot lights are crap and do not work properly. Amazon tells me they will replace it.

the package arrived in good order it was installed within 3 days and it worked fine. We really needed longer length of wiring for our walkway. We wanted to mount the spot lights above the walkway on our arbor. By the end on April the lights stopped working. Only worked for one month. The box that controls the lights quit working. We had a similar set of lights we removed and kept the control box and plugged the system into the old box and they worked again. My husband threw away all the packing information and I don't have the information to contact the company to see if they will replace the dusk to dawn control box. Any suggestions?

These lights are not what they were detailed to be.
They were very low quality,very difficult to install.
I would have liked to have known the low quality and
how cheaply they were manufactured before i purchased
the lights.Best regards,Bobby.
PS, These lights are not worth the price the boxes
cost to package them in!!!

I bought the 14 light kit back in September or October and installed them finally in December when my landscaper finished the backyard. Assembling the lights wasn't that hard (once I did the first one). Same thing with hooking them up to the electric. I took one reviewers tip and bought 14 guage wire to replace the 18 guage wire that came with the kit. This made it easier for the prongs to find the copper wire and make the connection. More importantly it allowed me to go further than the 75' it was designed to go because the thicker guage has less resistance. Do a web search on maximum cable lengths for low voltage lights if you need to go further than 75' and want to know which guage you need.

I did have a fear that maybe one or two lights wouldn't work out of the box and that they would look cheap seeing as how they were plastic and very inexpensive. However, they all worked and looked really nice at night. I was very happy with them until the transformer died one week later. Since I had purchased it more than 30 days ago I couldn't return it via Amazon. I called the customer support number and talked to Nicole in Wisconsin (that's right Wisconsin, USA). She was extremely polite and helpful. She had me send her the broken one and a few weeks later (today) I received the replacement. They actually gave me a better one... for my troubles I'm guessing.

I would be interested in hearing how many other people had their transformer die. I talked to an electrical engineer and they said the 56 watt draw (14 lights x 4 watts) is awefully close to the 60 watt output of the transformer. He said that you would normally want the draw to be about 75% of the output. I read something similar online. Not being an electrical engineer myself I can't comment too much on it. I mean this wouldn't be viable product for the manufacturer if it was designed poorly which ended in a significant amount of these going bad right?

Summary... it's a good deal for the price and they have good customer service. I did have to take 1 star off for the bad transformer but it's refreshing to see a company back their product like that and for that they get a good review.