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.

To add the finishing touch to fence posts, deck corner posts, gateway posts and other such spots, many people use a solar post cap light. They come in many different styles, to match your outdoor motif and personality. A row of these lights, on a long stretch of fenceline, looks great every night as dusk settles. And as solar deck rail lights, they also add a lot to the atmosphere of your back yard.

The light given off by these post cap lights is an ambient light, not suitable for tasks. If you need brighter lights, you may have to look into solar powered yard lights, which can be much more radiant. For most garden lighting, these are enough considering the low cost for electricity.

They use the power of the sun to recharge and therefore cost nothing to operate. In most ways these post cap lights are identical to solar powered garden lights, except they are mounted on top of a post rather than a peg or rod in the ground. The led lights are powered at night by 2 rechargeable AA batteries, which can last 8 to 10 hours.  The small solar panel on the top of the light recharges the batteries all day, to be ready by nightfall again.

If it becomes necessary to replace the batteries, make sure rechargeables are used, since regular batteries might wreck the solar powered post cap light. A lifespan of up to 10 years is possible for the light, but the batteries may not last more than 3. I have owned several solar lights for more than 2 years, and they are still working on their first set of batteries.  Fortunately, they are easy to remove and replace when it becomes necessary..

For installation, manufacturers may recommend an exterior grade construction adhesive for attaching your new solar post cap lights to the post. Make sure you read all the instructions should you install these yourself.

One great decorative idea is to use these solar deck rail lights on the corners and stairs of your deck. Inbetween the lights, regular decorative post caps can be used to accentuate the effect. This is a very cost effective, energy efficient way to add the the look of a deck or outdoor area.