Solar Powered Products

One of the easiest and quickest ways to spruce up your yard, garden or walkway this year is to purchase solar powered landscape lighting. These garden lights have become cheaper each year, with more and more variety available. Have a look in flyers or in the stores and you will be amazed at the selection of these and other garden decor items.

In ouy yard, we have quite a few of these solar powered landscape lights. I bought my wife a set of 6 for mother’s day 3 years ago, and she loved them. Every year she takes them inside the garden shed for winter and returns them to the yard in the spring. One of them is a little busted up after that lawnmower incident, but it still works. A few of the rechargeable batteries needed replacing last year, but other than that our original set is still in service.

The next year my wife bought a couple different styles of solar powered landscape lighting.One was shaped like a rock, and one was three mushrooms in a clump. Both of these landscape lights glow after the sun goes down for hours. She keeps both of these on the deck.

Last year we bought several more of these awesome solar powered landscape lighting items. We found a bunch of them shaped like globes, which hang from stands shaped like shepard’s crooks. These particular lights change colour every ten seconds or so, from red to blue to green. Every summer ight we would look out into our yard and see these solar powered lights shining away. We placed them around a Saskatoon berry tree sapling that we have planted in the middle of the yard. Everyone seems to love them when they come to visit.

I noticed a huge variety of solar powered landscape lighting items in the department stores this year. You can’t beat the prices on these led solar lights. It almost seems cheaper to buy landscape lights than the batteries that are in them.

I am thinking that this year we will be picking up a few stainless steel solar lights. There are many of them available, some in plain silver. There are quite a few of them in burnished copper colour as well, and I’m not sure if these are stainless steel but I suspect they are.

Solar powered garden lights are a beautiful and efficient way to increase the attractiveness and security of your yard.  These lights are stuck into the ground where they absorb sunlight all day, and use that energy for light after dark.  They can also be affixed to houses and used as porch lights or security lights.

Benefits of Solar Powered Lights

There are many benefits to using these attractive lights.  If you are ecologically minded, you will appreciate that they reduce the amount of fossil fuels that each house consumes.  If every house cuts back even in a small way on their consumption of coal or oil based energy, the overall usage of these expensive, unclean fuels will go down throughout the world.  Solar powered garden lights can reduce the amount of energy you spend on outdoor lighting around your home.  That also translates into lower energy costs for your home itself, and lower bills for you ever month.  As it so often happens, when we care for the environment, we also reap the benefits for ourselves.

There are more aesthetic benefits as well.  These solar powered garden lights come in an amazing variety of styles and colors.  There are several standard designs that can simply line walkways or highlight certain sections of your garden.  Most of these designs follow the same basic design; they have slender bases and elegant bulbs surrounded by glass or plastic globes, with rain guards over the top.  You can get them to cover just a small area in your walkway, or to cover a larger area with brighter lighting for security around your yard.  They come as flag lights, flood lights, spot lights, address lights, landscaping lights, or sign lights.

Different Designs of Solar Powered Garden Lights

They also come in attractive and even quirky designs.  You can get solar powered garden lights in the shapes of animals such as turtles, chickens or snails.  You can get hanging lights that look like old fashioned lanterns, light posts, or hurricane lamps.  There are lighted water fountains and meditation pools.  Solar powered lights can be hidden in rocks to provide a subtle, diffused glow throughout your garden or walkway.  Solar powered lights can be placed on steps to make sure that people don’t trip on the in the dark.  They come in floating colored globes, dragonflies, quaint cottages and flower shapes that add beauty and brightness to your yard or garden.  Some of them change colors, or simply glow white or yellow.  You can also have your address posted in solar power lights, so that it is visible at night.

Solar powered garden lights are a bit of an investment.  However, any property repairs to make your home more beautiful and energy efficient are worth the price, and you’ll never have to replace light bulbs, batteries, or wiring.  Solar powered garden lights are an attractive and energy efficient solar powered product to beautify your home, keep your property safe, and reduce the consumption of fossil fuels in your home.

I love camping out in the wilderness, and we have a 23 foot camper trailer that we use a lot every summer. We don’t need a lot of power, and the two deep cycle batteries on the front last about 3 days so most of the time we get along just fine.

On extended trips, the batteries start to run low. What I used to do was fire up the ‘ole gasoline powered generator and let it run for a couple hours to charge the system back up. The generator runs good, but it has a couple characteristics that I don’t appreciate so much. It is loud, and it uses a lot of fuel.

When you go out into the wilderness to get away from it all, the last thing you want to hear is a noisy engine blaring away. I don’t like it and other campers don’t like it either. I have to listen to the generator noiseof other campers too, and I would much rather listen to the birds chirping. And fuel; well, who likes to waste money on it and pollute the environment even more?

The solution is a solar setup to recharge your deep cycle batteries. So without further ado, here is my quick lesson on rv solar panels for beginners.

One of the key components is obviously the actual solar panels. They sit on the roof of the camper if they are permanently mounted, or on a stand beside it in the case of portable ones. Most rv dealerships either have or can order these, and will install them for you if that is the route you would like to take. You can also look online to see if you can get them cheaper. There are a few sites that show detailed instructions of how to install the whole system into your recreational vehicle.

The rv solar panels come in several different sizes, such as  80 and 120 watts, and 2′ x 3′ or 2′ x 4′ dimensions. They are made of arrays of photo-voltaic cells in a rigid grid, and you can link as many as you need to in series to increase your capacity.

Next, you need several deep cycle batteries. Most rv’s and camper trailers already have one or two of these. You need to figure out how much storage capacity you will need. Your rv dealer can usually help here as well. A couple of online calculaters can give you a pretty good idea of what you would need.

The last pieces you will need are a charge controller and an inverter. The charge controller keeps the batteries from being overcharged if there is too much electricity being produced from the camper solar panels. The inverter is needed to convert DC power to AC if you plan on running 110 V appliances such as a microwave. If yu don’t need 110V power, then this part can be left out.

As I mentioned before, it is possible to take a do it yourself approach and install all of these components yourself. The rv dealer can also do it for you, if you don’t have the time, the inclination or the know-how.

And that is the basic rundown of rv solar panels for beginners.