SUNVIE 12V Low Voltage LED Landscape Lights, 8-pack

What the numbers mean

900 lm from 12 W, eight of them. The most total light for the money on this page by a wide margin. If you have a large facade, a row of mature trees or a long drive, this is the box that covers it.

A 90-degree beam. Twice the spread of the LEONLITE. Ninety degrees is a wash, not a column: good for lighting a broad wall evenly, bad for picking out a single trunk without spilling light everywhere behind it. Match the beam to the job.

COB LED behind a glass lens. Glass rather than plastic, which stays clear instead of yellowing after three summers.

270 degrees of head adjustment. Enough to aim anything.

Transformer, cable and wire connectors all sold separately. The connectors are the one that catches people. The other kits on this page either include a tail with a fast-lock connector or come with a transformer; this comes with fixtures. Reviewers are consistently annoyed by this and they are right to be — read the box contents before you order, not after.

Who it is for

• Big jobs. Eight fixtures at 900 lm covers ground that four at 540 will not.
• Anyone comfortable specifying their own low-voltage components rather than buying a kit.
• Value hunting, on the longest track record of any spotlight here.

Who should buy something else

• You cannot solder. See below. This is a real condition and not a figure of speech.
• You want a narrow beam: the LEONLITE at 45 degrees.
• You want it to arrive complete: the DEWENWILS includes fast-lock connectors. Side by side.

What we could not check

We have not installed these.

The failure mode is unusual enough that it decides who should buy this. A cluster of reviewers — including one repeat buyer who has bought three separate times and hit it each time — describe poor factory soldering inside the fixture causing intermittent contact: the light flickers, or works when you wiggle it, and the fix is opening the housing and re-soldering the joint by hand. Once fixed it stays fixed, and those same reviewers keep buying, which tells you the hardware is otherwise sound.

We have not opened one, so we cannot tell you what proportion of a given batch is affected or whether current production has addressed it. What we can tell you is what it means for you: if a soldering iron is a thing you own and have used, this is the best value on the page and a mild annoyance. If it is not, a fixture that flickers is a fixture you cannot fix, and you should buy the DEWENWILS instead and pay more per fixture for the privilege of not caring.

Longevity, where they work, is good: one owner at five years, another reporting they stay visible through two feet of snow.

The rest of spotlights and floods

Price tiers are our own rough budget bands, not live prices. Check the listing for today’s price. The price itself stays on the listing, where it is current, rather than here, where it would go stale. The same catalogue drives the calculator, so a number here and a number there are the same number.