Mali Aluminium Black Spotlight

Mali is the small one, and that is the whole point of it. At 1.5 W it draws less than a tenth of what the big garden floods take, its head is 27 mm across, and at the price of a decent takeaway it is the fitting you buy six of rather than one of. It is not a tree uplight and it will not pretend to be. What it does is put a low, even wash of light onto the things you walk past — a low hedge, a rendered wall, the edge of a bed, the base of a letterbox — without any part of the garden looking lit from a floodlight.

The beam is 50°, and the 90° in the title is the tilt

These two numbers get confused constantly, including in our own catalogue data, so it is worth being plain. The tilt is 90° — that is how far the head swings to let you aim it. The beam is 50° — that is how wide the light comes out. Havit's ordering table gives the beam as 50° and their product page repeats it. Fifty degrees is a soft flood: at a metre it lights a patch a little under a metre wide, which suits a shrub or a wall panel and is far too wide to throw light up a tree. If you want a tight column on a trunk, its sibling Napa does 20° instead.

This is a 12 V fitting and it needs a driver

Mali runs on 12 V DC with a built-in LED — there is no globe to buy, match or replace — and it must be fed from a suitable 12 V DC LED driver. Do not connect the fitting directly to 240 V; a low-voltage fitting is destroyed instantly by it and the damage is not a warranty matter. The upside of low voltage is real: the cable run in the garden is safe to work near, and at 1.5 W each you can hang a great many of them off one modest driver. Havit's own compatible list splits into plain non-dimmable drivers and 12 V DC Triac-dimmable ones, and Mali is Triac dimmable — so if dimming matters, the dimmable driver is the part that has to be right, not the light.

Living with it outdoors

• IP65 and IK08 — sealed against driven rain and hose-down, and rated against a knock. In a bed that gets whipper-snipped, IK08 is the number that matters.
• 182 mm spike in a light 1.5 W head — it stays where you push it, including in loose mulch where a heavy fitting leans.
• Clear glass diffuser, not plastic, so it does not haze or yellow with UV.
• Tri-colour selectable at 3000K, 4000K or 5500K, giving 90 lm, 95 lm and 100 lm respectively — a small enough spread that you should choose on the look you want, not on brightness.

Aluminium with a poly powder-coated black finish, protection class 3 (no earth required), CRI above 80, and lamp life rated to under 30,000 hours. Backed by a 3-year replacement warranty. Low-voltage garden wiring is still electrician's work.

Buying several? Send Lights For You your fitting count and cable run and we will tell you which driver actually covers it — undersizing the driver is the most common way a cheap, well-chosen set of garden lights ends up disappointing.