Customer project 23- Fibre optic deck lighting

It's always a delight to us when customers send good photos of their fibre optic projects, and the ones we received from our client Neil J were among the best we've had.

This was one of those jobs where the specification slowly evolved over a series of e-mails and telephone calls as we worked towards determining an appropriate and cost-effective solution.

We'll let Neil describe it in his own words:

Even before the fibre optic lighting was added, this was an impressive decking structure.

"My project was more of a lighting project than any really accurate attempt to correctly represent the Stars in the northern hemisphere. This can be seen by the addition of the “Comet” we added with few fibres we had left over from the layout we had produced. With an amateur astronomer friend of mine we produced a layout of many of the major constellations in the Northern Hemisphere on a piece of A3 paper. We decided we could do this with approx 185 – 200 fibres. After agreeing the layout looked good I scaled up the A3 layout and redrew it onto 11 sheets of A1 sized clear acetate. The full size layout was going to fill an approximate circle 2 metres diameter.

"Upon deciding where on the decking I wanted it to place the layout, each A1 section of the layout was laid down in turn, matched up with its corresponding partner and 1.5 mm holes were drilled through the “dots” indicating the Star positions. Where the drilled holes fell into the gaps in the decking, I moved that particular star over slightly so that I was placing it into a solid piece of the wood. As the idea was to generalise on the actual star positions and not reflect exact relative positions, this worked well.

"I prepared the lighting unit by mounting it into the supplied water-resistant box. The box was drilled with holes, to allow for air circulation to the lighting unit. I had to carefully shield the holes I’d cut from direct water ingress as the unit would see some water falling directly on top of it. I also fitted a plastic sheet over the top of the box to act as a cover to help stop water ingress.

"I mounted the housed lighting unit under the decking, approximately in the centre of the 2 metre circle. I had adequate room to do this under this part of the decking. This was done to minimize the lengths of fibres required to complete the layout. It actually made the assembly and routing of the fibres more difficult than I had imagined. If I was to do this again I would have mounted the lighting unit to one side and put up with the increase in fibre lengths.

The two photos above show (left) the light source inside its modified weatherproof enclosure. Two flexes can be seen coming out of the rear of the light source, showing that it has been upgraded to allow separate control over the colour wheel motor, so as to allow selection of individual static colours. A hard-wired remote control unit can be seen in the right hand corner of the enclosure. The other photo shows the enclosure in place underneath the deck.


"Each separate fibre was then sleeved in a black plastic “wire insulation” sleeving and routed to a drilled hole. Pushed through and secured with the adhesive supplied. The protruding fibres were then cut off level with the decking surface to complete the assembly. The sleeving was done to stop the “light bleed” through the side of the fibre showing up in the decking plank gaps and spoiling the end effect. (Neil could have used our sheathed fibre, but chose to save money by buying bare fibre and adding his own cheaper sheathing)

"The whole project took about 60 hours to complete. A large portion of this time was taken up with individually sleeving each fibre, while lying on my back under my decking, locating each hole and feeding through the fibre. I needed help doing this in the form of my son shining a light through each hole so I could see them to feed the fibre through.

"Thank you, Peter, for your help and advice."


You're very welcome, Neil!