Choosing Between Mains And Solar Powered Outdoor Lighting

Outdoor solar lights have several clear advantages when compared to standard electrically powered lights, but it’s not at all a one-sided contest. This article takes a look at the arguments both in favour and against solar lighting. First, the positive side of things.

A key attraction for many people is that outdoor solar lighting is incredibly simple to setup. You don’t have to wire anything up or lay protected cables in the ground – simply position your new purchase where you want it then sit back and wait for nightfall. Also, unlike mains powered lighting that is tied to relatively static cables, solar lighting is just as easy to rearrange and experiment with

Financial outlay is another consideration. Although solar lights do cost noticeably more to buy than their conventionally powered equivalents, they are still far from being an expensive purchase and the full cost (which includes running costs) usually works out quite a bit less. There are very few maintenance issues and the only significant ongoing cost is replacing rechargeable batteries when they exceed the limit of charging cycles.

Apart from being almost maintenance free and dead easy to install, solar lighting also scores well where reliability and safety are concerned. It is also an extremely versatile technology in terms of potential applications and the range of styles and formats to choose from is huge.

However solar lights suffer one very obvious weakness – the sun, or specifically potential lack of sun. Not all locations can assure a reliable 12 hours of optimum charging each and every day. Seasonal and weather variations can reduce the level of available sunshine as can certain situations (aspect of your garden and the presence of tall trees for example).

Solar lights can also suffer if debris, falling leaves or snow block their solar panels. If you only have a modest number of solar lights then a simple solution is to periodically put the batteries into a regular battery charger to keep them topped up, but obviously this isn’t practical with large numbers of lights. Which leads neatly to the topic of rechargeable batteries. These are limited to a certain number of recharging cycles which effectively tells you how many days they will last before needing replacement.

Regular mains electric outdoor lighting is slightly cheaper than solar powered equivalents but the difference isn’t hugely significant for most domestic installations. For larger scale landscape lighting it might be an issue but you would have to carefully compare the operating and purchase costs to assess the impact.

Finally, outdoor solar lighting is typically missing two key features inherent in mains powered outdoor lighting. It’s not as bright and doesn’t retain its brightness levels over extended periods of time, and it cannot be switched on and off as required but tends to be automatically controlled by built-in light level meters.

So on balance then, if all you want is a limited amount of lighting that you can bring home and have working that same evening, plus you don’t need it on all night attracting low flying aircraft then outdoor solar lighting is a great choice. For more sophisticated setups and greater control you probably want to put the effort into installing regular electric lighting.

Check out this related article to learn more about solar spotlights.