Review of Moonrays 95534 10-Fixture Low-Voltage Plastic Tier Lighting Kit

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Moonrays 95540 Low Voltage Path Lighting Kit with Power Pack

I actually bought the Moonray kit with the spot lights, but wanted to also list my review on here since they are essentially the same kits (sans spot lights).

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 with the spot lights, 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. If it was just the pathway lights, I'd give it 4 stars.

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.

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It's not the forty some odd bucks down the drain that gets my goat, it's the valuable time I wasted trying to get these things to work. I've installed similar products in my garden before, so I'm not a novice. I got the spikes in the wires to connect all right, but the flimsy apparatus that connects the bulb becomes lose and kills the connection. I actually blew two bulbs in instillation and broke another trying to tighten the connection. It took an entire morning to get six of the damn fixtures working, remember I couldn't use all ten, as I now had only six bulbs remaining. When I looked out last night, one fixture had gone out after only four days of operation! In trying to reconnect it, I obviously blew the entire transformer, now rendering the product the obvious garbage it is, rather than the subliminal garbage it was when it arrived. Avoid this product, Amazon should remove it from their inventory immediately.

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I find this product to be almost junk. They are poorly made and I found them to work poorly if at all. I thought I was buying a better more reliable product. The connections from wire to light are a great idea wish they worked as well, and wished they would all work period. The transformer pack is not a time so they stay on all night wich was also not what I expected. The bulbs pop right in but again not all work. Spend a bit more money and get a better product. Again I guess I got a cheap product that souned a bit better than what I got and was not.

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I can see why folks are saying the transformers blew. I just blew one myself. The overall idea is a good one: Cheap lights like Malibu, theoretically easy to install, but with the connection between the light and the cable is up in the light housing protected from the weather. That's the problem with Malibu lights: the connection to the cable is outside exposed to the elements and it corrodes fairly quickly. The problem with Moonrays is also 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, probably 14 or 16 gauge. In order for the pins to hit the wire when the cable is pieced they have to be perfectly aligned. In my case, over half were not and it took hours of troubleshooting to make all the lights lite up. In order to accomplish this I had to have the transformer on, otherwise I'd never know whether or not I made a good connection. I used a screwdriver to push the cable up into the light base, and I must have bridged the two pins and blown the transformer. Also contacts for the bulbs come very close together, are easily bent, and I bet if a drop of moisture gets in between this tiny space: there's goes the transformer. I think the thing to do if you decide to get these anyway is to install with the transformer on (unless you have some condition where exposure to 12 volts, 4 amps will somehow harm you) and use the tip of one of the plastic stakes to push the cable up into the light housing and push the pins through the cable. 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. 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). 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. I may install a 5 amp inline automotive fuse in one of the two lines. Will that work since it's AC? I don't know I'll have to figure that out. There are cheap, auto re-setting circuit breakers; I may try one of those. If I had to do it over again I would not buy these lights.

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Six months and out. Transformer gone which, of course, renders the rest of this cheap set history. Unforunately, not a lot of corded sets out there to select from so its not a good consumer situation.