Viale 316 Stainless Steel TRI Colour LED

Viale 316 Stainless Steel TRI Colour LED

An inground light is set flush into the ground and throws light upward. It disappears completely by day, which is why it suits a driveway, a path or the base of a wall where nothing should project above the surface.

Because it sits in the ground, it deals with everything the ground does: water sitting on it after rain, grit, and the weight of whatever passes over it. Those are the specifications that matter here rather than beam angle - the IP rating for the water and the IK rating for the load.

Aim matters more than it does with most fittings. Light thrown straight up a blank wall is dramatic; the same light thrown into a sightline is glare, and inground fittings are almost always in a sightline because they point upward from underfoot.

Light output and colour

This is a tri-colour fitting: the colour temperature is selected at installation rather than fixed at manufacture. It runs at 3000K (270lm), 4000K (285lm), 5500K (300lm).

That is genuinely useful rather than a specification-sheet feature. Colour temperature is the setting people most often get wrong and most regret, and it cannot be judged from a showroom - it depends on the surfaces in the room and on the light around it. A switchable fitting lets the decision be made in place, and changed if it is wrong.

⚠ Set every fitting on a run to the same value. Mixed colour temperatures in one space are obvious and look like a fault, which is the one way a tri-colour fitting can make a result worse rather than better.

Colour rendering is CRI>80 CRI, which describes how faithfully colours appear under the light. It matters most where the light falls on planting, timber, brick or stone, all of which look flat under a poor-rendering source.

The beam spread is 120°.

Where it can be installed

At IP65 this fitting is rated for full outdoor exposure - rain, hosing and weather.

⚠ A weather rating is not a corrosion rating, and the two are confused constantly. The IP number describes water and dust ingress; what survives a coastal site is the material and the finish, and that is the thing to check within a few kilometres of the sea.

It carries an IK10 impact rating, which is what matters where a fitting can be stepped on, driven over or knocked.

It is made from 316 stainless steel.

Powering and installing it

This is a 12V fitting, so it runs from a driver rather than directly from mains. Size the driver to the total load of every fitting on the run, with room to spare - a driver working at its limit runs hot, and heat is what shortens its life.

Low voltage is the usual choice in a garden because the cable is safer to run and easier to extend later. The trade is voltage drop: a long run gets dimmer towards its far end, and the answer is a shorter cable path or a heavier cable rather than a bigger driver.

Plan the cable route before anything is fixed. It is the part of an installation that cannot be changed afterwards without undoing the rest of it, and it is the reason otherwise finished jobs get left half done.

Rated life is >30,000hrs.

Before you order

Two checks save most of the problems that show up after an installation is finished. The first is where the fitting will actually be seen from: a light chosen for how it looks in a product photograph is being judged from a viewpoint nobody will ever stand in, and the same fitting can be discreet from the house and glaring from the street.

The second is what else is going in around it. A single fitting is rarely the whole scheme, and matching colour temperature and finish across everything in a space matters more to the result than the specification of any one item in it. Mixed colour temperatures in particular read as a fault rather than as a choice.

If you are unsure whether this suits what you are lighting, our team at Lights For You will talk it through against the actual space rather than the specification sheet.

Frequently asked questions

Download Datasheet (PDF)

Download Datasheet (PDF)