Solar Landscape Lighting
John W. Jackson
What brand did you use? How long have you had it installed?
Regards,
John Jackson
Don Klipstein
: Anyone have any experiances to share with this type of product?
: What brand did you use? How long have you had it installed?
I know someone who had some Brinkman ones and was not really satisfied.
The light output was like that of a penlight and most of them stopped
working within a year. Then again, this is in one of Philadelphia's
suburbs in an area with some trees as well as a house that blocked the sun
for a couple hours, and neighbor's houses blocked the first hour or two of
sunlight. And I have seen Philadelphia get 10 cloudy days in a row a
couple times.
I do suspect many solar powered landscape lights, lawn lights, etc. are
designed with some optimistic assumptions on the amount of sunlight they
will get. The solar cells should be exposed to sunlight nearly from
sunrise to sunset and preferable aimed a little south to be hit most
directly by the noontime sun. And I might turn them off if you have an
unusually bad string of cloudy weather. And turn them off if the
rechargeable battery inside runs low due to recent cloudy weather.
Overdischarging a rechargeable battery is not good for it.
I believe these problems and limitations don't apply only to Brinkman
models.
- Don Klipstein (d...@misty.com)
Eric Gunnerson
Solar cells are expensive, and put out a surprisingly small amount of power.
Commercial high output cells claim 3 amps at .46V for 100mm x 100mm square
in full sun. A panel this size therefore produces only about 1.3 watts at
best while the sun shines.
The bulbs I use in my low-voltage lighting system are 7W, and they aren't
very bright.
If the sun shined full force on the cell for 10 house, the resultant charge
(assuming no other losses) would light 1 bulb for about 1.5 hours.
There's just not enough power in the panels they use to do something useful.
Devon's Mom
that uses replaceable NiCd batteries. The lights cost me $19.95 each (regular
price). I like them so far. I've only had them for a week though. I think the
brand name was "Malibu", but I'm not positive. There were more expensive models
($39.95), that I might think about getting later that might give off more light
than the ones I bought. Plus the more expensive models have an off switch which I
think might extend the life of the light (or battery?) if you can turn it off for
awhile so you can make sure it fully recharges.
Colleen
Kirk Kerekes wrote:
> In article <6q21v8$hqh$2...@news.misty.com>, d...@Misty.com (Don Klipstein) wrote:
>
> Note that all such lights use NiCd battery packs to store the energy
> yielded by the solar cells.
>
> Note that such NiCd packs are rarely rated for satisfactory performance
> after more than 500 charge/discharge cycles.
>
> Note that the light goes through a complete charge/discharge cycle every
> day. There are 365 days in a year. If you get 18 months of useful service
> from one of these units, you will very lucky.
>
> If you can find a light that takes off-the-shelf NiCd batteries, so that
> they can easily be replaced, perhaps you might consider them to be an
> acceptable solution. All the units that I have seen, however, use
> soldered-in batteries.
>
> --
> Kirk and Diane Kerekes/Red Gate Ranch
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