Landscape Lighting and Irrigation After a Paver Driveway Project — A Lighthouse Point Customer Story
A wonderful client named Leila called us recently from Lighthouse Point. Her father had just bought a beautiful home in town, and they had just finished a full paver replacement — new driveway, new patio. Everything had worked before the project. After the project, the landscape lighting was down and the irrigation wasn’t covering the zones it used to.
If you’ve ever lived through a paver project, you know how aggressive the work is. This is the story of how we diagnosed and repaired both systems — and the two pro tips that would have saved them the call in the first place.
Written by Jorden Ross, owner-operator at Florida Boys Lawn & Landscape.
Why paver projects almost always disturb landscape lighting and irrigation
A driveway and patio replacement is one of the most physically aggressive projects you can run on a home. Heavy equipment. Jackhammers. The old surface broken up, the base material excavated, often a foot or more of ground removed and replaced. Even the best paver crew can’t avoid touching every wire and irrigation line that runs alongside or under those zones — because almost every system on a typical Lighthouse Point property has wire and pipe running in exactly those places.
Things break. Wires get cut. Connections get pulled apart at the splice. Drip lines and laterals get nicked. Sometimes a heel of a worker’s boot snaps a wire that was already brittle from years in salty soil. None of this is bad workmanship. It’s the nature of the job.
The mistake isn’t the damage. The mistake is finding it after the new pavers are already down.
Pro tip #1 — Test the systems before the pavers go back down
Before the paver crew places the final base material and starts setting pavers, ask them to pause for one day. That day, have your landscape lighting and irrigation tested. Turn on the transformer. Walk every zone. Run the sprinkler system one zone at a time and watch for missing coverage or new wet spots.
Any damage that shows up gets repaired right there — while the wires and pipes are still accessible. A connection that needs a new splice takes ten minutes. A broken irrigation lateral takes twenty. The same repairs, after the pavers are set, mean cutting up brand-new pavers, pulling them up, fixing the line, and re-setting the pavers — turning a $200 repair into a $2,000 disturbance.
Most paver crews are happy to coordinate this if you ask. They want the job to finish clean too.
Pro tip #2 — Have extra sleeves set during the install
A sleeve is a length of PVC pipe laid horizontally under the new pavers. It does nothing on the day it’s installed. What it does is give you a permanent, clean path to pull a new irrigation line or a new landscape lighting wire later — without ever touching the finished paver surface.
Four to six sleeves placed strategically under a new driveway, patio, or walkway will cost almost nothing while the crew is already there with open ground. The same sleeves added later are essentially impossible without breaking up the pavers.
Where to set them: one under each side of the driveway entry, one or two under any walkway that crosses the front beds, one or two under the patio leading to the backyard landscape, and one in any zone where future irrigation or lighting expansion is even remotely possible. Think five years out, not five months out.
It’s one of those decisions that costs almost nothing now and saves thousands the first time you need to add a single fixture or a single sprinkler head.
What we found at Leila’s property
We worked around each other’s schedules and met Leila and Tammy at the property. Walked the project together. Listened to what they had been seeing — lighting that wasn’t coming on, zones that weren’t covering the way they had before.
First thing we did was diagnose the landscape lighting transformer system. The transformer itself was fine. The signal was leaving the cabinet correctly — meaning the damage was somewhere in the field, not at the source. From there it was about isolation: shutting down zones one at a time, testing each run, and identifying the runs that had lost continuity.
After some time troubleshooting, we tracked the failures down to a few broken connections — spots where the wire had been pulled apart during the paver work and never reconnected properly. We made the repairs, restored the continuity, and then walked the entire system to verify every fixture: the uplights on the palms, the uplights on the bushes and shrubs in the front landscape beds, every downlight, every pathway light in the front of the home, and through the back yard — which, I’ll say, is an absolutely lovely tropical landscape.
By the end of the visit, every zone was firing the way it was meant to. The system was fully restored.
Why this story matters
Leila and Tammy had already been getting quotes for rewiring the entire landscape lighting system and going under all the new walkways and driveway areas. That’s the path you end up on when nobody takes the time to actually troubleshoot — when the easy answer is “the whole thing is bad, replace it.”
Rewiring the entire landscape lighting system on a Lighthouse Point property — especially after a brand-new paver driveway and patio have just been finished — means trenching back under the new pavers, re-burying every run, and re-doing what was already there. A service repair for tracking the existing system was a fraction of that cost. The system was salvageable. It just needed eyes on it and the patience to isolate the actual failures.
If you’re in a similar situation — lights down, zones not covering, system seemingly broken after some kind of project — before you sign a quote for rewiring the entire system, get a second opinion on the diagnosis. A real service repair for tracking the system is almost always the place to start. There’s a real chance most of your system is fine.
What to watch for after any paver project
If you’ve recently had paver work done, walk your property after the first irrigation cycle and after the first evening the landscape lighting runs. You’re looking for:
- Landscape lighting fixtures that aren’t turning on, or that flicker
- Zones of the lawn or beds that aren’t getting watered the way they were before
- Wet spots, puddles, or pooling water near the new pavers (almost always a sign of a leaking line underneath)
- Sprinkler heads that hiss, spray inconsistently, or pop up but don’t throw water properly
- Areas of the lawn that are starting to brown out faster than they used to
Catch it early. Every one of those issues is fixable while it’s small. Each one becomes more expensive the longer it sits.
Get a landscape lighting evaluation
If you’re in Lighthouse Point, Boca Raton, Deerfield Beach, or Pompano Beach and you have a landscape lighting system that isn’t doing what it used to — or you want a landscape lighting consultation to evaluate your existing system — we’re happy to come out and take a look.
Same thing if you’re thinking about a new landscape lighting design at your property: something that gives the front of your home a totally different feel and vibe at night, something welcoming and finished as you pull into the driveway, or something for the backyard that lets you enjoy dinner with friends and family long after the sun goes down. We can walk the property with you, listen to what you’re picturing, and put together a few options.
I meet every new client personally. No phone tree, no estimator, no salesperson — just me on your property, with the time to understand what you want.
Call Jorden — (561) 886-7982
Related: our landscape lighting service hub, landscape lighting in Lighthouse Point, landscape lighting in Boca Raton, and our irrigation service hub.
A real thank you to Leila and Tammy for the trust on this project. Stories like this are the ones we’re proudest to tell.