Creating outdoor lighting for your home, yard or garden!

You may have recently moved to a new house and decided to add some twinkle to your garden, back yard, lawn or patio. Or maybe it is a place where you have spent all your life and now you’d like to do a few subtle or dramatic changes with outdoor lighting. It could be that you just want to add a bit of creative touch to your apartment balcony where you catch a breath of fresh air after a long day. Your neighbors across the yard have some nice string lights on their balcony and you are starting to think about doing something similar.

Where do you start?

It can be a challenging and at the same time a fun process when looking into creating outdoor lighting for your home, yard or garden. The fun part of the process is that you are in control of creating a unique outdoor environment, inspired by your own imagination. You can create a comforting, welcoming mood with unique and eye-catching outdoor lighting.

However two challenges come to mind – finding a good bargain on the lights themselves, and the cost of hiring a licensed electrician to do the installation.

This is where solar powered outdoor lights step in. Solar lighting has become an increasingly popular alternative to the conventional and costly electric lights that currently illuminate our homes and living spaces.
Solar lights are affordably priced, simple and safe to install yourself (no digging ditches, laying the wire and attaching it to a junction box), and solar lights can be relocated easily, and above all else, you also save on electricity costs.

Solar lights use photovoltaic cells that absorb sunlight during the day and turn it into energy. Rechargeable batteries store the energy, making it available at night when it is needed. LED (light emitting diode) bulbs, which require little power and last 10 times longer than incandescent bulbs, provide the illumination. There is no wiring necessary to connect the lights to each other or to the electric grid.

Until recently, most solar lights emitted only muted light and were not all that reliable. With the latest developments in the solar lighting industry, this has changed and super-bright LEDs have replaced more conventional filament bulbs.

Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) create light without producing the waste heat of regular bulbs, are very bright, and yet require a minimal amount of electricity to function. The result is a reliable, long-lasting light source that will typically work for the life of the solar light product.

Other progress in solar lighting technology has been made in the development of more efficient, affordably-priced photovoltaic cells, improved circuitry, and more efficient batteries.