I do not have a single outlet in my soffits.

Every December I am on the front porch plugging a timer box into the porch outlet and running extension cord up the wall.

I build houses for a living.

Somebody will tell me they want soffit lighting. Accent lights up under the eaves, on the house year round. That one comes up on its own.

Almost nobody asks for power up there.

Those are two different things and only one of them tends to make it onto a plan. The lighting is a look. The outlet is the thing you are going to want every December for the next thirty years.

It is almost always me bringing it up, and that is probably the only reason it gets brought up at all.

If all you do is put a receptacle up in the soffit, you have solved half of it. You still have to get up there to turn it on.

What you actually want is outlets at the soffit, home run back to one switch inside the house.

That switch is the whole thing. It is where a smart switch or a timer goes, and from that point on your lights come on and go off on a schedule. No ladder. No timer box sitting on the porch. Nobody walking outside in the cold to unplug something.

Corners. That is the default and it covers most houses.

On a bigger house with a long run across the front, add one in the middle. But you do not need them every fifteen feet. The corners usually give you plenty of coverage.

I put it in a coat closet or a hall closet. Somewhere central.

That is not about looks. A switch on a hallway wall is a switch somebody flips on their way past, and now your lights are running at two in the afternoon in July. In a closet nobody touches it by accident, and you can still walk right to it.

That closet is also where the smart switch or timer lives. Set it for the six weeks you want it. The rest of the year, flip it to always on if you need power out there for something.

If you go with a smart switch, the closet is perfect, because you are running it off your phone anyway and you may never touch the switch again. If you go with an old fashioned dial timer, the closet still works, you just have to open the door to change it.

Some people want them always hot instead. I still recommend switched, because the switch is what buys you the timer.

Exterior outlet on the front porch. Timer box plugged into it, sitting out there on the porch. Extension cord from the timer box, around the corner, up the wall, to the lights.

Then the same setup again on the back if you run lights back there.

Then more extension cord to reach whatever the first one did not.

It works. Almost everybody does it. I do it. It just looks like exactly what it is.

An outlet outside has to be weather rated and GFCI protected. That part is not optional and your electrician already knows it.

Here is the part worth asking for. The reset does not have to be up in the soffit. A GFCI outlet protects everything wired downstream of it, so the one with the buttons on it can sit inside, in the garage or a closet, and still cover the soffit outlets.

Otherwise the first time it trips, you are dragging the ladder out to push a button.

One outlet at rough in, while the electrician is already up there, runs around $150.

Adding one to a finished soffit later, depending on who you get, runs $500 to $600.

The whole setup, a few outlets home run back to a switch, is a few hundred dollars at rough in. Call it three to five times that after the fact.

And I have watched people decide they wanted it at the very end of a build, right before they took possession. It is not that it cannot be done. It is that you pay three or four times for the same thing you could have had for $150.

This one does not go to your electrician. It goes to your builder, when you are going through what you want electrically.

"I want outlets in the soffits at the corners, home run to one switch inside, so I can put a smart switch or a timer on it for Christmas lights."

And then the one nobody asks:

"Can the GFCI reset be somewhere I can reach without a ladder?"

If you are past rough in you are not out of luck, you are just paying retail. If you are still on paper, this is a five minute conversation.

This one is in the field guide, and there are twelve more like it in the electrical section alone. Cheap now, expensive later, every one of them closing before they close the walls.

Be honest. Nobody is judging, I am in category two.

If you know somebody whose plans are not final yet, forward this to them today. It is a five minute ask at rough in and it is gone the day the soffit goes up.

And if one person signs up off your link, I will send you the full cost breakdown of the first house I ever built. Every line I tracked, 2017 prices, which are going to hurt to look at. It is not for sale and it never has been.

That is it for this week.

Hit reply and tell me whether you have them. I answer these myself.

Jon | Built With This