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LED landscape lights
I have been putting in some landscape lights. In another thread, I mentioned my previous problems with solar lights and suggested that efficient LEDs might be an answer. I have an LED flashlight that will last 200 hrs on a single set of AAA batteries.
Well, I bought some new solar powered lights from Malibu that use LED lights rather than bulbs. These came in a kit from Home Depot for $37 for eight lights. These are accent lights and do not do a lot of area lighting, but area lights are also available. (But, I can clearly see my driveway at night with even the accent lights)
In my previous experience with Siemens solar lights, the bulbs would only last a few months and the lights would not stay on the entire night. So far the LED lights from Malibu stay bright all night and use much smaller batteries. To top that off, the whole light costs less than five dollars and the bulbs for the Siemens lights were more than $2 each and I had to buy about two per year.
These look like a good approach if you can get good sunlight for the night light at least a few hours each day.
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LED landscape lights
I guess that it depends upon what you need. Around the house and where I have electricity available, I use wired lights and they are plenty bright. I didn't like the solar powered incandescent lights that I used before because both the brightness and length of operation on battery power was low. The LED lights seem to have solved the length of operation problem.
I live in a pretty rugged desert area. These LED "accent" lights that I have just installed only mark the sides of a long driveway that runs along the top of a ridge between two arroyos. There are no guardrails on the driveway and if someone decides to drive in and turn around, they could end up in the bottom of the arroyo in seconds. These Malibu lights are not powerful, but you do get enough light to walk the path at night easily. (dimmly lit but adequate)
The Carmanah lights surely look like top quality units, but at $160 to $350 a pop, they are a bit expensive and overpowering for this application. (I could buy > forty of the other lights for the price of one) I would bury wire and use conventional lights before I would buy thousands of dollars worth of these lights to light a long driveway.
While I was looking for the low light units that I bought I also saw longer lived and brighter LED lights for a fairly reasonable price that will do some area lighting. I don't think that they are as bright as my wired lights, but they are certainly better than the incandescent solar lights that I have seen and they are bright enough to read a newspaper by.
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LED landscape lights
I have had the LED lights in for about a month now, and I like them. These lights are not going to let you read a newspaper at night or land an airplane, but they line my 350 ft driveway with markers that are easily seen. There are no pole lights around my property, and these little lights light up the drive well enough to walk it at night.
The lights have been staying on all night due to the efficient LED technology and the normal sunlight has kept them going strong.
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LED landscape lights
Peters, your link does not seem to work. I added a picture of the LED light taken on a dark night. It is not the best picture that I have taken, but it does show the light output after being on for several hours. See picture 7.
These lights do seem to dim slightly by the next dawn, but so far they stay on all night and do mark the driveway at night. The Seimens incandescent solar lights that I used before were generally fading by midnight.
I am sure that there are better and brighter lights out there, but for $5 apiece, I am happy with these and plan to install more. These lights mark a dropoff that is easily big enough to swallow a car.
My picture 8 might give you a better idea of the dropoff. My tractor is parked right at the edge where the slope goes down about forty feet and is too steep to walk on.
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The ground here is so hard that I don't even dig it without the backhoe. We have only had about four inches of rain this entire year, so the sub-soil (colichi) is like an adobe brick. I finally cut in a road at the bottom of the slope in the picture. My pucker index got a little high driving across that slope even though I was down near the bottom.
The main purpose of the marker lights is to keep visitors from walking or driving off of any of those slopes in the dark. It gets very dark here and my house is on an island of land in the middle of fifty acres of very rough terrain.
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I tried to take a picture like that, but the resolution of my camera is not high and all you end up with is a few points of light on a dim background. You cannot see the effect of the light on the road. I have some much brighter wired lights around the courtyard in front of my house, and even those don't show up any differently. When I shrink the images down, the small items that you can see get even worse. I have tried various settings on the camera and it just does not take good pictures in dim light.
I am not saying that these lights make the road bright like a city streetlight, but they do mark the edge of the road, stay lit all night, and provide enough light that you can walk on the road at night. We are at a high enough altitude and the air is extremely dry and clear, so we don't get much backscatter light off of the sky. For the pilots in the group, the visibility often goes beyond 80 miles. Astronomers regularly set up on my property and nearby because the sky is so dark. On a dark night without these lights, you cannot see your feet or the driveway. It is like having your eyes closed or being in a cave.
I saw the SS light that I think that you were referring to. It is a very nice looking light. I think that the cost was $50. So, for 10X of the price, I would expect them to be brighter. But the duration of the light is only 8 hours and that was one of the things that I disliked about the Seimens lights that I had before.
These lights work in my situation. Your situation is certainly different, so they may not work for you. But, for the price of one of the expensive lights, you can try a whole set of these Malibu lights. If you want a very bright landscape light, you should look at the more expensive alternatives.
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