Hands on with EVO by Coastal Source

Outdoor lighting is a fun category. The feeling I get pulling up to my house in the evening is magical. Thanks to a review I wrote a few years ago about Coastal Source, every tree and pathway are perfectly lit with fixtures built to withstand a nuclear blast (and, incidentally, the weather). Five years in and I haven’t had a bit of trouble with any of it, save a couple of attacks by the lawnmower man and a hungry chipmunk with a penchant for cable insulation. When Coastal Source asked me if I wanted to review its new EVO product, I instantly thought of the last redoubt of darkness on my property; the deck.

My deck has always frustrated me because it’s horribly lit after dark. When we bought the house, it came with a rickety outdoor lighting system which came on and off intermittently (often in the middle of the day). The new EVO product launch seemed like a great opportunity to finally get this annoyance off my 99 problems list. Coastal Source touts its new offering as customizable, with a smaller form factor and design elements allowing the fixture itself to become the feature.

Design

I worked with an amazing Coastal Source designer named Val Klein who asked me for a few photos and offered some suggestions about how the deck could be best lit. We ended up settling on a design that would bathe the deck itself in a warm glow and provide clear pathway lighting on two sets of steps. She sent me clear documentation including a graphical layout. After a few back-and-forth discussions, I greenlit the design and product was soon on its way.

Unboxing

The new EVO product arrived in two plain brown cardboard boxes. Each fixture was intuitively labeled and swam in a cable sea of various lengths and gauges. One of Coastal Source’s huge advantages is its patented Plug+Play system, which requires no wire stripping. Everything just screws together in a nice watertight seal.

Installation

Each of the fixtures Val chose required the same hole size drilled into the deck. EVO is built on a universal platform where the fixture housings, lenses, and decorative shrouds are all interchangeable. I chose 1 ¾-inch Forstner bit for the job, hoping for a nice clean bore. We measured (I recruited my 11-year-old daughter), marked and drilled my first hole. The bit chewed away nicely and, before I knew it, I was press fitting my first, round marker light.

Each of the fixtures has a nice rubber collar which perfectly seats into the hole. The overall look resembles the corona of the sun during a full eclipse. It was incredibly satisfying to install the first one and I immediately wanted to do it again. I continued installing the remainder of the marker lights on each set of steps. I couldn’t wait until the sun went down to see what they looked like. I moved on to the deck itself, drilling and installed sconces and under-bench wash lights designed to reflect off the decking and look like an illuminated cocoon nestled in the corner.

I then moved “below deck” to connect and properly wire manage the numerous pigtails which now sprouted from the joist bays. It was a piece of cake. I sorted out the cables into their respective lengths and followed along with Val’s layout guide which color coded each segment of the circuit. I loosely connected them all together and plugged in the hefty burial grade transformer. I looked around the dark crawl space and saw the illuminated backsides of the marker lights. So far so good. I walked up the steps and checked out the wash lights and sconces. All of them shone brightly. Very seldom does a job like this fire up properly the first time, but Val and Coastal Source Design Services had engineered a perfect outcome.

The Reveal

As the daylight faded, I began glancing out the window to see if the lights were visible. It took a few hours, but I noticed a faint glow finally start to kick in around dusk. The marker lights and accompanying eclipse effect really popped as I stepped back to behold my handiwork. The sconces looked good, but I quietly wondered if they could be brighter. It took me a minute to figure out that the EVO sconces are super customizable when it comes to light output. They have rubber knockout dots which reveal a little bit of light at a time or the entire knockout spacer can be removed to allow the full wash effect to shine. I removed these spacers from all five sconces and took another look. Now we were cooking with gas! The down wash effect from the sconces coupled with the under-bench lighting delivered that same magical feeling the rest of my outdoor lighting emanates.

As a final test, our family had dinner a few nights later and my wife remarked how nice the lights looked. I hadn’t told her what I’d been up to, and she’s not usually tuned into the technology side of the house. Her compliment was the ultimate stamp of approval, and I bathed in the afterglow.

Final Report

Each of the EVO fixtures retails for around $400. My deck project used around $6,000 worth of Coastal Source product. Throw in some labor and the sticker price on a professionally installed version might run $7,000-$8,000.

Is that worth it? It depends.

If you subscribe to the “buy once, cry once” philosophy and don’t want to be screwing around with a system that needs constant servicing, Coastal Source is a no brainer. Their brand is unapologetically expensive because it’s designed for brutal Floridian coastal weather. Once you hold one of their fixtures in your hand, you intuitively understand “this is the good stuff.” EVO’s new approach to simplicity and making the fixture customizable with endless design options should notch another hit in the record books for Coastal Source. I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.