Context
I'm looking to install some low voltage (12v) landscape lighting in front of my house. I had helped a friend in the past install some in their front yard using the straight method. However, I was reading through the manual that accompanied my transformer. It mentions two wiring methods: Straight and Looping. The manual isn't descriptive (with poorly drawn pictures). It seems that the difference between the two is that the looping method prevents voltage drop, but requires more wire.
Before stumbling upon the looping method, I was thinking that I would do the straight method in two directions from the transformer (denoted by T). I would take one cable to the left and one to the right to avoid daisy chaining them all together wasting additional cable. After reading the manual, I'm thinking of doing the looping method with 2 loops for each side respectively. I'm having my landscaping re-done professionally which gives me an optimal time to put the wiring in – so I would rather get this right while everything's tore up.
Question
Are there any other advantages, disadvantages, or gotchas between the running the wire as a loop vs straight? Should I be running two wires to the left and right respectively? Any recommendation on what I should be doing?
Reference
I'm using a 12v 120W Transformer all with 11 – 7W LED lights and 2 – 9W lights. I'm planning to use 12g wire landscaping wire. The image isn't drawn to scale, but I did put some labels of the approximate distances. The grey lines are my edgers. The yellow stars are the lights.
Best Answer
I installed my system and looped it as I did to many other systems I installed. The advantage is no voltage drop but also give you the option to add additional lights just about everywhere in the areas long as you don't use the same path for the cable.