Category Solar Basics

I have been taking apart solar lights for the better part of a decade, mostly because they break and I…

A flickering solar light is one of the more annoying failures in a yard, because it is not fully broken.…

A solar light is a tiny power plant, and like any power plant it has good days and bad days.…

Every solar outdoor light on the market today uses silicon photovoltaic cells. Monocrystalline silicon in premium fixtures, polycrystalline in mid-range,…

People assume solar lights love heat because they love sun, and the two get conflated. The truth is more awkward.…

Standard solar lights operate on a simple binary: the sun charges the battery during the day, the battery powers the…

Most people never see the circuit board inside a solar light, and the manufacturers would prefer it stay that way.…

If you have ever stood in a yard at night and noticed that some solar lights cast a warm amber…

The solar lighting industry borrowed bifacial panel technology from the utility-scale solar market, where dual-sided panels have been generating 5…

Circadian lighting spent a decade as a niche concern of sleep researchers and high-end interior designers. The idea is straightforward…

Every spring, a neighbor asks me some version of the same question. “I want to put solar lights along my…

The promise of all weather solar lights is that they keep running when ordinary solar lights quit. A stretch of…

The most common complaint about solar outdoor lighting has nothing to do with brightness or runtime. It is that the…

If you have ever cracked open a solar path light after two seasons and found a swollen, leaky AA battery…

I get the question a lot from greenhouse owners: can I just run solar lights in there and skip the…