Outdoor solar lights have several clear advantages when compared to standard electrically powered lights, but it’s not at all a one-sided contest. This article takes a look at the arguments both in favour and against solar lighting. First, the positive side of things.

A key attraction for many people is that outdoor solar lighting is incredibly simple to setup. You don’t have to wire anything up or lay protected cables in the ground – simply position your new purchase where you want it then sit back and wait for nightfall. Also, unlike mains powered lighting that is tied to relatively static cables, solar lighting is just as easy to rearrange and experiment with

Then there’s cost. Outdoor solar lighting costs slightly more to purchase than regular electric lighting but it’s still not especially expensive and total cost of ownership is actually much less. That’s simply because they cost almost nothing to run (there’s still the cost of replacing rechargeable batteries occasionally) and require very little maintenance.

In addition to scoring well for low maintenance and ease of installation, solar lights are also highly reliable and intrinsically safe in an outdoor environment, not to mention endlessly adaptable with seemingly limitless different uses. And that’s before you even get to see range of available formats and styles.

But as ever there’s always a price to pay somewhere and with outdoor solar lighting the giveaway is in the name. Solar lights need sunlight and not all locations are ideally suited. If you have a great deal of shade for one reason or another, or are affected by seasonal changes or frequent bad weather then your solar lights will struggle to recharge properly.

Solar lights can also suffer if debris, falling leaves or snow block their solar panels. If you only have a modest number of solar lights then a simple solution is to periodically put the batteries into a regular battery charger to keep them topped up, but obviously this isn’t practical with large numbers of lights. Which leads neatly to the topic of rechargeable batteries. These are limited to a certain number of recharging cycles which effectively tells you how many days they will last before needing replacement.

On the whole, solar lights are slightly more expensive than their electrically powered cousins, but this is really only a consideration if you are planning a large installation and you would anyway then need to workout the trade-off between ongoing running and initial purchase costs.

Finally, outdoor solar lighting is typically missing two key features inherent in mains powered outdoor lighting. It’s not as bright and doesn’t retain its brightness levels over extended periods of time, and it cannot be switched on and off as required but tends to be automatically controlled by built-in light level meters.

In conclusion, if you don’t especially need very bright lighting that stays on all through the night and prefer an easy installation and instant results then opt for outdoor solar lighting. If however you are looking for more than fairly basic landscape lighting and don’t mind the extra work involved then go for mains electric outdoor lighting.

Check out this related article to discover more about the solar lantern.

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