Getting Started With Outdoor Lighting
Things to consider when selecting outdoor lighting. Before deciding to use solar power for any function, you may want to consider the intrinsic advantages and disadvantages of relying on the sun for power. Whether you choose solar powered lighting for outdoor areas or you choose traditional lighting methods, it’s vital to consider the good and bad of each method.
The Good Qualites Of Solar Powered Outdoor Lighting
Dependability
When you use solar powered lighting for non crucial applications like outdoor house lighting, you are able to set up the lights and forget about them. They can do their job for years without any need for maintenance.
Continuing Lighting Cost
When using solar powered outdoor lighting for non critical applications like landscape or outdoor lighting, you can often set it up and forget about it. With the suns rays being completely free, the long term cost of your landscape lighting amounts to the initial cost of the lights. This is a huge advantage, where using solar lighting instead of electrical lighting to light up your landscape and outdoor areas can in time save hundreds or even thousands of dollars over the course of years.
Setup
If all you mean to do is light your pathways, dark corners or driveway, then solar lighting is a excellent choice, as you’ll be able to set the lights into the ground very easily, without any difficult, messy or potentially dangerous electrical hookups.
Solar Powered Outdoor Lighting Maintenance
There is measly upkeep needed for solar powered outdoor lighting other than wiping off the solar panels from time to time, as they should last years before you need to repair or replace them.
The Bad
The Initial Cost Of Solar Powered Outdoor Lighting
As with all types of solar powered equipment, the initial cost for solar powered outdoor lighting is usually higher than with standard electric outdoor lights. If you have a large yard, long driveway, long pathways or want to light up all your trees at night, then the preliminary cost of solar powered lighting may add up to quite a lot depending on the type and quality of the lighting.
Solar Lighting Reliability
While the need for upkeep is cut down noticeably by using solar powered outdoor lighting, there is also another side to the reliability issue. Since You are using a power source that is only available for little more than 12 hours a day on average. When you factor in rainy, foggy, snowy or stormy days will allow the lights to collect very little energy for lighting at night. In the case of weather inhibiting energy storage, some solar lighting kits have a built in back up battery or use electricity as a backup power source. However, in the case of lights that have no backup battery or power, you may find that on winter days, they can only light up for a small number of hours a night.
Conventional or low voltage lighting may cost less to purchase but will be much more harder to set up and keep up. Deciding whether to use solar lighting can require a considerable amount of planning.















[...] Getting Started With Outdoor Lighting Conventional or low voltage lighting may cost less to purchase but will be much more harder to set up and keep up. Deciding whether to use solar lighting can require a considerable amount of planning. [...]