Lighting the house numbers

Moving the house numbers to the kitchen wall makes it clear that this is one house. The main problem is that that wall is dark at night.

Lit-up house numbers

First plan was simple: Install an outdoor outlet, tapped into some basement circuit, then buy a low-voltage garden lighting kit, hang the transformer on the house and point a 12V light up at the numbers.

When I bought the outdoor outlet (weatherproof box, weatherproof cover, GFCI outlet, silicone sealant = $45.67 with tax; the outlet is $20), they were selling 120V LED spike lights. Transformers are ~$70, so $12 for the single light that I needed sounded good.

The only problem (and I have to admit I didn't think about this right away) is that the light would be on all the time. The timer was on the low-voltage transformer I didn't get.

The solution (for now) is to just wire the outlet to the post light power. Instead of a general-purpose always-on outlet, we'll have one that only has power dusk to dawn. If we go the low-voltage garden way later, we can convert this to always-on simply by attaching it to a basement outlet instead of the post light.

The underground feeder gets its power in this box. By attaching the new outlet here, anything plugged into the outlet will have power only at night. (By the way, you can see the original post light power cable (black) running above the box. I should probably remove that.

So, first night. 550 lumens is too bright, perhaps. It's a flood and maybe it should be a spot--we don't want to call attention to the gas meter and the eaves. (Maybe moving it farther away would help.)

The other problem is that the numbers are too high on the wall and too small.