For lucky garden owners lighting the area around the house is very important. How do you choose external solar lights and which ones are the best?
Wide range of choice
The key to choose garden solar lamps properly is their functionality – they have to light alleys and paths, providing us with the safety of moving. However, their role does not end there. We pay more and more attention to their aesthetic values. Garden lamps give character space, exposing important details – an unusual wall, an interesting brick, or a plant arrangement. Which solar lights are the best? The answers to this question are as many as gardens.
In the solar lighting market, there has never been such a choice. There is everything: wall sconces, numerical lighting, standing lamps, in run lamps (they also work well in the garage) and portable solar lamps – useful in smaller gardens, where there is no space to install several frames at the same time. There are also floodlights attached in the ground, which highlight by quirky objects: shrubs, trees, walls, or artistic constructions. That is why the choice of lighting for the garden requires much thinking. With a wide range of products, it is easy to buy something that is not suitable for our garden.
Solar lights – application
Solar lights can have many applications. The simplest and cheapest solar lamps are usually small and give little light (with a power not exceeding 1 W). This is a reason why they are most often used as subtle shiny points. We can find them, for example, lightening a path in the garden.
Their more quirky version is various decorative figures in the shape of butterflies, dragonflies, frogs or flowers. Some of them shine with a uniform, white light, while others shimmer with almost all the colors of the rainbow. Placed on the flowerbed, near the pond, on the balustrade or next to the relaxation corner, they can be an amazing decorative accent of the garden or balcony. The novelty among them are floating versions that can be used to decorate ponds or in pools.
A certain variant of solar figures are ball-shaped lamps. Their shades can be attached to a metal foot that allows you to stick a lamp in the ground or placed on a stand, allowing you to set the ball directly on the ground or lawn. Shades can be made of transparent or frosted glass or plastic and shine in a uniform, white or changing, colored light. An interesting version of this type of lamps is also shiny solar pots, made of plastic, backlit with LED lamps.
Solar light hoses can also be an interesting garden decoration. They may be used to highlight the contour of rebates or pots, create an interesting figurine, as well as to decorate walls in the arbour. They will give little light, but they will be a nice decorative detail.
Another
practical application of solar lamps is to use them to highlight the
street number on the building’s wall. Such lamps do not give too much light, so
if we want more decisive lighting of the garden or terrace, we can opt for
sconces, reflectors or solar lamps with a bit more power (several watts). This
type of lighting can be attached to the wall of the building or placed on a
special leg in the ground. With the light of such lamps, it is impossible to
read a book, but it will certainly be easier to find a garden stair, a driveway
to the garage or an armchair in the seating corner.
How to choose the best solar lamps?
Solar lamps in the vast majority of cases are very simple – both in the way it works and in the design. Therefore, we do not have to get into the shopping aspects incredibly, because there are relatively few of them.
It is, however, worth knowing a few things:
In our list, we specify models with a battery that during the day is charged – in the simplest way, it collects energy from the sun’s rays. When it is dark, the light comes on – the light source is the LED.
Classic solar lamps are hammered into the ground. In their design, they have a kind of stiletto that easily penetrates the soil. As you can see, solar lamps for the garden are simple gadgets, but with the development of technology, they also evolved.
- Time of shining
When buying a solar lamp for garden lighting, I recommend that you first learn about its lighting time. Better lamps should shine at least for 8 hours
- Sensor of movement
When they have a twilight sensor, they turn on when it gets dark and turn off in the morning. This is a practical convenience. Some products also have a motion sensor that makes the solar lamp glow when it detects motion around itself.
- Lights colors
And what about the color of solar light? Currently, we can easily get a cheap LED lamp for the garden, which in addition to white and cold colors, can shine in different colors. So if in the name of the lamp there is a mysterious RGB, then tell us that it tells us about multicolored lighting.
- Standard of endurance
And what about the resistance to weather conditions? After all, such a lamp must be resistant to them, right? Yes – recommended solar lamps offer increased protection class, and more specifically IP 44. It guarantees adequate tightness, thanks to which the garden lamp can easily cope in conditions of increased humidity and nothing gets into it.
- The brightest solar lights:
In some cases, the solar lights are only meant to give extra charm to our garden. Sometimes, however, we need pieces that emit much more light. Especially for those who are looking for just such an option, we have prepared a list of lights that will deal with it perfectly.
