Category Maintenance & Repair

Phone, notes app, dusk. That is the entire equipment list for the ten-minute audit I run two weeks before anyone…

When a solar light dies, what do you actually have? Most of the time you have a four-dollar problem wearing…

It is two in the afternoon on a bright November Saturday, the sky a hard blue, and one light in…

Every November the same argument breaks out in a solar forum I read: someone announces they have pulled the batteries…

Open up a fogged solar light and you will find one of three things: a tired gasket, a hairline crack,…

The set by my side gate went into the ground glossy black. Three summers later the housings had faded to…

Off-season care is the thirty minutes you spend in November deciding whether your bug zapper works in April. That is…

A dead battery is a five-minute job. A corroded battery is an afternoon, a pair of gloves, and a judgment…

I killed my first solar fountain through pure optimism. It was a small two-tier model on a patio corner, and…

The comfortable myth is that a single dead path light is a single dead path light. You pull the unit,…

The path light by our back step had been flickering for a week, and I did the usual thing: blamed…

A tipped path light is a physics problem wearing a plastic hat. Wind pushes on the head, the head sits…

There are two ways to spend the first frost night. In version one, you are outside at nine in the…

If this October is following the usual script, your solar lights are not working the way they did in summer,…

Fall is the season that decides which of your solar lights see spring. The math is boring but real: a…