I live in a condominium community and the board hired an electrical contractor to wire up some additional lights on an outside wall. The lights are on top of square posts which were built with conduit down the center for future lights.
What the contractor did was run liquitite to a box where a transformer steps down the voltage to 12 volts. From there he simply ran what looks like industrial zip cord around the bottom of the wall and into the conduit (or, in one case, up the side of the post and through the mortar at the top cap).
My question is this: is it code to have 12 volt wire simply running on top of the ground, without any conduit whatsoever? This looks very suspicious to me but my past experience doesn’t give me enough information to know if this is code or not. I’m not worried about whether or not permits were pulled (I think not) but whether it is code and whether or not it is safe. Since the wire runs through areas where there are plants, it is highly likely that the wire will be damaged or broken over time, exposing raw wire to whoever may reach down with a hand to do future gardening and such.
Thanks for any input you can provide.
John Hardy
Replies
If the proper (current-limited) transformer was used it's code.
This is how most landscape lighting is installed. At a minimum the wire must be protected from "surface" damage. This means that it can't be running across the surface of a sidewalk or other area that will have traffic on it.
The wire, transformer, and lights are tested as a system, and are intended for use as shown. Indeed, the cord you describe is one of the very few that will survive in direct contact with the ground (ordinary extension cords will not).
The cord can be buried. It actually sounds like the guy did a better job than many I've seen.
Thanks to everybody for quick replies. I personally would have run the wire in some sort of conduit to protect it, but I quite often over engineer things.
John