Does anyone in the Midwest REALLY use Outdoor Solar Landscape Lighting?

Because of the 4seasons that we go through, I find it difficult to find a durable set of Solar Landscape Lights that will both illuminate areas to compliment the landscaping and will last for more than 1-2 seasons.

I have seen .[url href=http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?whse=BCtopnav=prodid=11036178ec=BC-EC3202-Cat21236pos=0F]this[/url] set at costco, but don't know anyone who has purchased them. They appear to be durable and I am trying to avoid black plastic lights since those will fade and tend to be less durable. On the flip side, I don't want a major expensive set (more than $20ea) of brushed metal or other form of metal.

I am not completely opposed to low voltage lights and if I could find a set with the , but I figured I would give the solar lights a try.

Any thoughts or experiences?

I am in Omaha...
I work at LOWES and we sell several versions of the solar powered garden lights, and they come back all the time...
They just do not last, and even before they die, they never really put out very much light. They just sort of have a glow.
I wanted to use them, but when my new home is completed here in a few weeks I'm just going with low voltage. They are so simple to install, and they actually produce usable light.

Thanks for the reply and the experience of customers bringing these lights back to the store. I am afraid to invest in some solar lights because the lights I assumed to be solar in and around my home really did not illuminate much light, but then maybe the ones I have seen are a few yrs old.

I have to think more readers on these forums use solar since the idea of sustainable building or materials is appreciated by dwell readers.

Anyone else?

The problem with solar-powered lighting is that getting a decent amount of light means a big investment in photovoltaics and storage batteries.

Let's go through the numbers: To illuminate a path, for example, you'd use a series of 10 W incandescent fixtures, spaced maybe 5-10 feet apart. The LEDs used in solar-powered lights have roughly ten times the luminous efficiency of incandescents, so you'd need 1 W LED fixtures for the same amount of light. (And I've done some tests and personally verified that a 12 V, 0.8 A white LED lamp, about 1 W, designed as a replacement for incandenscent lamps in automotive applications, does put out a respectable amount of light.)

Okay, so if you had ten of these fixtures, you'd need to support 10 W of power consumption. Say you want them to stay on all night, even in winter, and you want them to keep working, even if it's cloudy for a week. That works out to an energy consumption between solar recharges of somewhere around 1000 to 1500 W hr.

In most parts of the country, you can count on an average of 4 solid hours of noon-equivalent sunlight, so that's the amount of charging time you have per reasonably sunny day. That means you need a photovoltaic panel that can put out somewhere between 250 and 375 W. The least expensive photovoltaic panels cost somewhere in the vicinity of $4.50/W, so that's going to come out to about $1500. The photovoltaic panel should last at least 25 years, so your operating cost for the panel is no more than $60/yr.

You also need a battery to store the energy between recharges. A good quality sealed lead-acid battery with sufficient capacity is going to set you back about $200, and will last five years. Therefore, that part of the operating cost is $40/yr.

So, for your ten dinky little lights, you're going to need a basic operating budget of $100/yr, and that's not including the up-front costs for the fixtures themselves, the wiring and control electronics, etc. You can eliminate the battery costs by using an intertie system (where you store your energy in the electric company's grid), but there's a significantly greater up-front cost for the necessary electronics (at least $1000).

I think you can now see why the cheap little fixtures you can buy at your local home center don't put out much light. Is exterior solar lighting worth the cost? That's up to you to decide. The numbers don't add up if all you're looking at is the bottom line and the payback time, but if you also take into consideration the fact that you're dumping less carbon dioxide into the air, etc., then it starts to make more sense. One thing's for sure, though. If you plan to go solar, it makes [strong]much[/strong] more sense to go all the way, and put together a whole-house package. The infrastructure costs of trying to do solar in bits and pieces will kill you.

-Steve

Thanks for the insight Steve. I think you may have tipped the scales for me by putting your reply in a quantitative state.

Ok, maybe this is morphing into another topic, but what are your thoughts on low voltage lighting. Will I have to pay a high price to get a quality light that will survive in the four seasons longer than 2 yrs?

I do have some experience with low-voltage lighting, but it's not extensive. I do think that particularly at the low end of the cost spectrum, you pretty much get what you pay for. Once you exceed a certain threshold, though, the extra amount that you pay goes to one of three things: (1) quality, (2) glamour, and (3) deception. Most people are willing to pay more for a robust, well-engineered product, and nobody wants to be deceived. How much you're willing to pay for glamour is a personal decision. Unfortunately, when you're comparing the $100 fixture with the $20 fixture, it can be very difficult to determine how much of that $80 difference is going into each of the three categories.

At the moment, I have a low-voltage system running nine 7 W incandescent fixtures. I think they cost around $10 each, plus the wiring, timer, transformer, etc. They work pretty well, but one of the fixtures keeps going out because of some kind of bad connection at the bulb socket. I've tried to figure out what's wrong, but everything looks fine. All I have to do is wiggle it a bit, and it works for a few days, and then stops working again. So that's one data point on the quality/glamour/deception cost curve. But don't ask me to explain what it means.

By the way, I should have mentioned in my last message that you get a little more bang for your energy buck by using halogen fixtures, and a lot more by using fluorescent fixtures, although I've been disappointed by the longevity (or lack thereof) of compact fluorescent lamps. And fluorescents have trouble starting in cold weather, so they're limited in their outdoor applicability. LED fixtures would be even more energy-efficient by far, but except for the solar-powered ones, they seem to be few and far between.

-Steve

FYI, I saw that exact set of lights walking back from the bar thursday night in St. Paul. I have to agree with the 'glow' comment. They don't actually light the path...mainly just offer some sort of glowing border.

They looked OK, but I definitely wouldn't compare it to actual path lighting.

Here in Lansing, MI. Though it doesn't get pitch black at night, we are on the outside of town, with a large pond and woods on the side away from town, so that is the darkest side. We purchased a set of ten stainless solar lights on ebay, and they actually light the yard pretty well. In the winter, light is reflected back up to our first floor (house is a walkout) and it illuminates the living room. Great for midnight jaunts to get water, change diapers, etc.
Though the set was incomplete, it included all the most important parts. It was only missing a few posts, and had extra stakes. Oh well. I figured I could make posts from copper or stainless pipe, but as it turns out, I rather liked having the lights just sit on rocks with no post.
The set was about $55 delivered. They worked like a charm. I have never had the wired style of landscape lights, but for all the trouble of installing them, maintaining them, hiding wiring, I would buy more solar lights in an instant.