Solar Lights

Posts Tagged ‘accent lights’

How to Choose Outdoor Solar Lights

When choosing outdoor solar lights, it is all about application, application, application. This is the biggest consideration when deciding on a particular light.  Let’s consider what goes into a solar light.

First, you have a photovoltaic cell that captures the light. The bigger the cell, the more light it can capture and convert to energy. Size is not everything though.  The biggest factor when dealing with solar cells is the efficiency.  That is where the biggest advancements in technology are happening.

Next, you need something that stores the energy. Most solar lights use nickel cadmium batteries for energy storage. Next you have the light itself. This is where LED technology comes into play. LED’s are a “cool” light. That means that they can convert the energy that is given to them into almost pure light, rather than the combination of heat and light that older filaments produce. This makes the LED’s much more efficient. They also have a much longer life than older light types.

Keeping all this in mind, you really need to make sure that the solar yard lights you are buying are going to suit your application. Let’s assume that we are not going to go with yesterday’s technology, and we are going to make sure that the lights have high quality photovoltaic cells and LED’s. Let’s look at the three basic types of outdoor solar lights, and how application needs to dictate the lights type.

First is solar accent lights. As the name implies, this type of solar light is meant to add accents to your home landscaping. Since accent lights are fairly dim compared to other types of solar lights, they have a much longer run time. It is not uncommon to get a couple of nights worth of light out of a single day’s charge. Look for accent lights that have multi-crystalline solar cells. They can collect energy even on overcast days. I should also note that the amber LED’s seem to have a longer run time than white. There are also many styles of accent lights that can compliment the surrounding scenery.   They also work great as solar patio lights.

Next are solar path lights. These solar lights are brighter than accent lights. They are meant for lighting pathways, driveways, walkways, etc. Solar path lights come in a variety of options for mounting in a way that will work for your project. Just keep in mind that they are really meant to focus the light downward, toward the ground. As they run brighter than accent lights, you can expect shorter run times.

The brightest of the outdoor solar lights are spotlights. Solar spotlights are used to cast a beam of light toward a particular feature of your home’s landscaping or architecture. As the light is projected away from the fixture toward another object, most people prefer to have them hidden out of sight. This can make them difficult to energize, as “hidden” and “in direct sunlight” is usually a contradiction in terms. For this reason, many solar spot lights have a separate “solar panel” that connects to the light with a wire that can be mounted in an area that gets more light. This allows you a great deal of versatility in locating your spotlights in just the perfect spot for the greatest effect.

Hopefully this will help you to buy the right outdoor solar lights for the right application without some of the costly mistakes that often come about in “do-it-yourself” type projects.  And don’t forget to read our article  Solar Lights Reviews.  Did you know that there is such a thing as indoor solar lighting?  Learn more about these, as well as about solar skylights in our indoor solar lights post.


Usage and Benefits of Solar Lighting

Many of you have seen the little solar lights that are used as accent lights in gardens or along walkways or whatnot to add aesthetic appeal to a home’s landscaping. In fact, when most people hear the term “solar lights”, that is usually the picture that pops into their head. With the mindset of our society going more and more toward “green technology” (rightly so), we are seeing more and more of these green lighting solutions.

A quick internet search will show that, not only are the solar landscape accent lights very popular, but there are a lot of other types as well. We see motion sensing solar lights, spot lights, flood lights, commercial perimeter lighting, and many others. In fact, some cities are even upgrading street lights to solar power.  It is also possible to have indoor solar lights and solar skylights!

Not long ago, solar technology was such that it was not practical for use with many lighting applications. The solar cells just couldn’t hold enough juice to keep the lights lit for very long. Great advancements have since been made in solar technology facilitating the use of solar security lights, solar post lights, solar flood lights, etc. These advancements include the increased use of nickel cadmium batteries to store the energy collected from the solar cells and LED lights that put out more illumination and use much less energy than more tradition forms of lights.

So what are the benefits of using solar lights as opposed to more traditional lighting solutions? The most obvious advantage would be that they use a free, renewable source of energy – the Sun. Yes, the batteries do need to be replaced every couple of years or so, but if you compare the cost of the batteries to the cost of the electricity you will save, you will find that the savings is significant. The carbon footprint on our environment is also much, much smaller.

Another big advantage to using solar lights is that each light is its own self contained unit. That means that if you have a set of lights, and one of the lights fails, the rest of the lights continue to operate. If the power to your home is interrupted, your solar lights continue to function. You also don’t have to worry about running wires from one light to the next to a power source – they are wireless lights!

As you can see there are many uses for and benefits to going with solar lights. Please check back often for more in depth articles about the improving technology, uses for, and benefits of going with solar lights. Please feel free to contact me with any questions or topics you would like covered. Our next topic will be outdoor solar lights.