Garden Lights – Garden Lighting Choices – LED, Solar, & Path Lights
Garden lights make a great addition to your backyard spaces, like gardens or patios. They can be used for simple lighting, highlighting the yard in the evening hours, or they can be used for safety purposes to light deck steps or pathways through the yard. In addition, they add a decorative element to the landscaping, and can be featured on their own as a novelty item.
Some of the novelty garden light designs are creatures like little frogs, snails, rabbits or cherubs. Others are inanimate objects like fake rocks or garden cones. Simple strings of colored lights are used for decorative purposes as well. You can find simple globes that light up too.
These days one of the most popular options is solar powered garden lights. Solar lights have many advantages. They work by using solar cells on the tops of the lights that charge self contained batteries to power the lights at night. Some lights use replaceable rechargeable batteries like AA cells, which is preferred since these will wear out before lights themselves. They use LED (light emitting diode) lights as the actual lighting element. These are more efficient than your typical household lights like incandescent or fluorescent bulbs, and can work off the low voltages that batteries can easily provide.
The newer generation of LED garden lights are efficient than some of the older ones, so if you are using these to light an area for safety be prepared to pay a little more for brighter LEDs. The LEDs themselves should have a fairly long lifetime, and the lights often stop working for reasons other than light failure.
Some solar cells will loose their effectiveness over time as well, from details like clouding of the glass covering, or dirt collecting on the cell. This can result in the brightness dimming over time. Finally, while it can be tempting to put one in a perpetually dark place like under a dense tree canopy, if they don’t get light during the day they won’t work. To combat this there are some models that separate the solar cell from the light, so it can be placed in a bright spot independent of the light placement.
The traditional favorite for garden lights are low voltage lighting systems. Often running off 12 volts, these are wired to a power source like a transformer. The low voltage makes them fairly safe for anyone to install, but they do have to have wire run to each lamp. These are popular for lighting a pathway or a house foundation. The obvious advantage is that they will work regardless of the amount of sunlight, and can be placed anywhere. The can use low voltage incandescent bulbs, which are pretty inexpensive. Often they run off a timer set to come on at night, but with a power outage these garden lights can get out of sync and come on at the wrong time.
Filed under Garden Landscaping by John
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