Wake up landscape Professional landscape lighting community and take notice

25 Jan Wake up landscape Professional landscape lighting community and take notice

By Mike Gambino

In recent blog articles my friend and colleague mark Carlson has documented a trend taking
place all across the landscape lighting community today… a sorry state of
affairs afflicting enterprises great and small. It’s called Apathy.

I call it “The Shrug”.

“The Shrug” is when a multi-million dollar manufacturer who previously reserved their products for the trade only, announces they now offer their products direct to end consumers without the participation or involvement of the professional lighting designer/installer.

Yet all the pro designer/installer can do is “shrug.”

No grief. No anger. No boycott of the product line nothing.
Just a shrug.
Pathetic
And it’s not just lost business opportunities.. That same lack of passion
and drive for excellence sadly seems to have taken
a back seat to the lackluster marketing  efforts some have made by attempting to be the consumers guide to landscape lighting with the questionable information they are dispensing on the internet.

As a business owner/entrepreneur I KNOW how
dangerous this general sloppiness can be to one’s
operations. Closing the sale has NEVER been more
difficult. The great recession has made every
dollar spent a serious decision in the mind of
the consumer. That is why I appeal to fellow professionals to step up and take notice with what is happening with the industry around you.

I spend a good deal of my time at night, after working all day in the field designing, installing and maintaining landscape lighting systems, doing research. Perusing articles, blogs, message forums on the internet to see what others are saying about my field of specialty. I am open to reading whatever I get my hands on to expand my knowledge and follow the trends and for information to write about in this blog.

Recently, especially this week I have become disgusted with some of the garbage information I have seen much of it coming from fellow designer/installers from other parts of the country. I am convinced that some of these guys have never studied or operated a successful business. Here is some of their offerings.

From the guy in the middle of the country whose goal is to get everyone who has a lighting system to switch to LED by badmouthing halogen systems. First I want to state that I am a huge proponent of LED lighting and have been installing it exclusively over the past 3 years. We also encourage LED conversions for some of our clients when the conditions exist for the client who will benefit the most from doing so. I don’t use poor, self serving and inaccurate information to induce an upgrade.

He states that within 2-3 years every halogen lamp in a system will have to be changed at least once which is costly in both labor and materials. This is a gross exaggeration and a patently false statement in regards to losing every lamp as we have never once with over 1,000 past halogen systems installed experienced a necessity for a 100% bulb change on the system in that short period of time.

Perhaps this is true of the low quality cheap brand bulbs he uses but never with what I used for over twenty years. In fact the brand I used during original installation and what we use during maintenance has excellent lamp life and when it ultimately does die which can be up to 5 years or more in some systems they have retained 100% of their reflector and did not have a noticeable degradation of light output at the end of their lifetime. He states that halogen lamps should operate between 10.8-12 volts with up to 5 fixtures on a cable run. The only time we would run 5 lamps on a cable run is if they were close to the transformer and each one was a maximum of 20 watts. Also, we never installed a system with such a wide voltage range as the color shift, brightness level and lamp life suffers. All of our systems are within 1/2 of a volt of each other on the entire system 11.5-12 volts. He states that once 1 halogen goes out it’s just a domino effect if that bulb is not immediately replaced and the rest follow suit. This is also a dramatic over exaggeration. We have never once experienced catastrophic failure because we properly voltages our systems in the first place. I take offense to the use of scare tactics and would like to know why he never notified his customers before installing those systems if halogen is so bad.

I also take issue with this bloggers statement about the lack of maintenance required with LED lamps because they last 15-18 years. Show me an LED that has lasted anywhere close to even half that age at this date in time. You won’t find one because it is really way too early as LED’s haven’t been installed in low voltage landscape lighting systems for more than 5 or 6 years. Ironically in an earlier article this blogger complained of early catastrophic lamp failure on his earliest LED installations and of course blamed the manufacturer. LED or no LED, landscape lighting systems will always need regular scheduled maintenance if one wants the system to look the best. Fixture finishes and Lenses will require cleaning. Plant materials will always need clearing away from fixtures. Timers may need reprogramming. O-ring seals will need greasing and replacing. Fixture seals will need to be checked for water tightness.

Then I find a nice article which is well written about landscape lighting that is accompanied by some good photos, very informative. I get to the end and see in the comments a totally outrageous reaction to the article. The writer who installs lighting systems applauds the author for a good article yet challenges him on the dollar figure range which the author gave as a general cost an owner can expect to pay for a professionally designed and installed lighting system on their property.

I thought the figure was valid in some cases and couldn’t believe that any pro would have a problem with it as a representation to the general public. Well this guy apparently did as he challenges the author over this dollar figure range stating that his normal jobs come in 65%-70% lower than that. Now I happen to know that this installer users a cheap low to mid grade product line and services a middle class clientele. No problem with that other than the fact that the commenter found a need to impose his low values on the rest of the readership and lighting industry because those are his own personal experiences. If he chooses to offer that kind of product and service at that low of a price point then that’s his business if he wants to work for wages. I have a problem with it when he tries to make his way the industry norm and inform buyers that this is common and standard quality/value/price that one can expect.

Then the finale or the icing on the cake comes from a landscaper whose comments about how his business is structured and how his lighting jobs play out just blows me away.

“The main reason I’ll do the daisy chain instead of hubbing or fixture grouping is because it’s the easiest method to teach my installers. I’m not the one out there doing it myself. I’m relying on my installers. And depending on the job, it could be one of our guys on enhancement crew (very limited lighting experience), it could be an landscape/hardscape install crew (good with the basics of lighting installation, but not experts) or it could be one of our service technicians (advanced). So I just want to keep it as simple as possible. in our area, the industry is dominated by migrant workers who don’t speak the language real well and maybe had a 8th grade education. We could have a huge discussion about that alone. But that’s the reality of how business is done here. I can’t make it too complicated or it just wastes too much time trying to explain it all to them and every new guy who we hire. To me, this is really simple and that was one of the reasons I switched to LED several years ago. I had done the hub method for years and it was always challenging for my workers to grasp. Nowadays, installs are much easier.”

Wow, if the general public has a poor opinion of landscapers (and lighting people) then this public admission sure didn’t due anything to change it.

I posted a comment about this on my facebook page and another contractor commented- “This landscaper utilizes a business model that focuses on quantity over quality. It may work very well for his company. Let’s face it, we are all in this profession for profit. Although this model may not be ideal for the lvl industry, it works well for him. To each his own.”

What a sad commentary that is to validate this as if to say hey he’s doing his best so whatever works for him, I don’t care.

Maybe I should change my reading habits to drama or fantasy fiction.  Although on second thought much of what I’m ready already has a huge element of fiction and fantasy to it.

Next week’s blog will focus on separating the wheat from the chaff and how to interpret the information you are getting from different sources and how it relates in regards to the type of marketplace they serve.

This landscape lighting blog is published by Mike Gambino of Gambino landscape lighting inc. all rights reserved. Mike is a professional landscape lighting system designer/ builder and has been designing, installing and maintaining landscape lighting systems for more than 20 years. Mike resides in the Los Angeles area with his wife and 2 sons. To visit his website go to www.gambinolighting.com . To inquire about hiring Mike please click here .

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