Solar Lights

Posts Tagged ‘outdoor solar lights’

Best Selling Solar Garden Lights

Those of you who have read my other posts on this site already know why solar garden lights are a must have for any home landscaping project. Outdoor solar lights have huge benefits over more traditional garden lights. Some of those benefits include:

• Ease of installation – Installing solar lights in your garden usually takes only a few minutes, and requires few, if any, tools
• Lack of wires – Most models are completely wireless. Those that do have wires only have one wire leading from the light to the solar panel.
• No maintenance – Solar lights are set-and-forget technology. The LEDs are intended to last the life of the product. The most you will ever have to do is wipe the panels clean from time to time.
• Low cost – Although these fixtures are a little more expensive than more traditional garden lights, they cost absolutely nothing to run, so they pay for themselves.
• Aesthetically pleasing – Solar garden lights are absolutely beautiful. They come in more styles and colors than you could possibly imagine. If you can’t find a solar lighting fixture that you like, you are just not looking.
• Eco-friendly – They use the power of the sun, which environmental experts agree is one of the fastest growing “green technologies” in the world.

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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.


Indoor Solar Lights

Up until this point, we have mostly discussed outdoor solar lights and the different applications for them. In this article, I would like to discuss indoor solar lighting. Yep! Indoor solar lights! Most of us find that even during the day, the rooms of our homes can be quite dark, unless the windows are left open. This means we either sacrifice our privacy, or turn on the lights. Lights = electricity, right? Not necessarily.

One great way to light up the inside of your home during the day is with a “solar skylight”. These aren’t actually solar lights, because they do not use a solar cell to transform light into energy to be stored and used for another purpose. They are actually like a regular skylight that uses reflective tubing between the roof and the ceiling to basically “funnel” the light into the room. Many of these solar skylights even allow for adjustment of the intensity of the light as well. These lights have huge benefits over standard lighting and even conventional skylights. Some of these include:

• It can go anywhere. The compact and flexible design of solar skylights permit them to be installed in about any room, including rooms without direct roof access and smaller spaces where day-lighting would usually not be an option.
• Installing it’s quick, tidy and easy. There is no structural framing, tunneling, sheet-rocking or painting. A professional can install the product in less than three hours and most Do-It-Yourselfers can finish the project in a single day.
• It is very cost-effective – Tubular solar skylights cost considerably less than other day-lighting options, such as skylights and windows.
• It’s “Green.” Solar skylights permit you to switch off electric lights during the day, which provides savings on energy bills and also reduces environmental pollution.
• It’s actually healthy for you. Several prominent studies have shown that increased daily exposure to natural light can enhance physical and mental well-being, and boost energy and concentration levels.

There are also other forms of indoor solar lights for a variety of other applications. Some of them fairly simple and others much more involved. Finding information about other forms of indoor solar lights is a little more difficult. Most require the installation of separate source of solar power that you can use to power your solar lights as well as just about everything else in your home. One form of indoor lighting technology that is getting more and more feasible as we speak is Hybrid Solar Lighting. There are some great ways to use solar lights indoors, however that do not require much work at all.

Most home improvement stores sell portable solar lights. These are lights that you can put anywhere that you need light at night that gets sun during the day. What if your home got adequate sunlight in the kitchen during the day? Could you place one of these portable solar lights in your kitchen so that it would charge during the day and provide light at night? Sounds like a great idea! How about a set of track lights that mount in the ceiling where you only need to run a single wire to a small solar source outside? That would work as well. If you use your imagination, you will find many ways to use indoor solar lights to save you money and help save the planet.

Outdoor Solar Lights

Out of all the different kinds of solar lighting that you can install around your home, outdoor solar lights are by far the easiest and safest to install. That makes it an ideal first project for the do-it-yourself solar lights enthusiast.

The good thing about outdoor solar lights is that (in most cases) there is no wiring involved at all. With low voltage outdoor lighting wiring is needed to run from the lights to an external power source in order to function,even though the voltage level is very low and relatively safe. But solar lighting is powered entirely by sunlight. That means no wires! With outdoor solar lights, each light contains a specifically designed solar collection panel that gathers energy during the day, stores it up in rechargeable batteries, and then uses that energy to power the lights at night.  This means they are perfect for solar security lights or just any other application that you can think of.

Some of the places that you can install outdoor solar lights are darkened areas of your walkway or steps (it’s nice to see where you’re walking at night), the entrance to your driveway,  as decoration for your wood deck or landscaping, and perhaps to bring attention to a particularly appealing architectural feature of your home.  You can install solar shed lights to extend the use of any outbuildings you may have.  You can even light up your backyard BBQ area with solar patio lights.  Whichever purpose you choose, one of the big advantages to using solar outdoor lighting is that you don’t have to worry about running cables or wiring of any kind. You simply install the light itself by pushing it into the ground in the location you desire and let the sun do the rest! You just need to make sure that each light will be in a location where it will get an adequate amount of sunlight each day in order to properly charge the batteries. Most solar lights are able to last up to 15 hours on a fully charged set of batteries.

One thing you should know before you choose outdoor solar lights is that the light that is emitted is not as bright as other forms of outdoor landscape lighting. Whether or not you consider this a disadvantage will probably depend on your individual taste. Many prefer the soft, more subtle light that these fixtures put out  and feel it actually helps set the mood better than incandescent lighting. There are a lot more choices in color tones as well as many of them LED technology that can create almost any tone or color.  With these choices comes the freedom to explore more and more front and backyard landscape ideas.

Another benefit worth mentioning is that solar lights require almost no maintenance. If a light fails, you simply replace the batteries. If it still doesn’t work, in most cases, you just replace it. Individual lights are becoming less and less expensive, and can be found at most home improvement stores.

So is you can see, a solar outdoor lighting system is quick and easy to install, adds mood and character  to your home at night, is easy to maintain, inexpensive to buy,  and cost virtually nothing to run. Like all things solar, solar lights are also good for our environment.