I think this may be a more appropriate place for this.

I have a 100W panel and extra battery that sits at home 11 months a year. I started thinking about using them to power 12V landscape lights. Normally in the installation of low voltage landscape lights a transformer is plugged into a receptacle. It doesn't make sense to use an inverter off the battery to plug in a transformer to step down the 120V to 12V if my goal is powering 12V landscape lights. I'm assuming the main function of the transformer is inverting the AC to DC.

The more I'm juggling this the more confused I'm becoming.

Has anyone tried this or have some thoughts?