I’m looking for something to cast a little light along my driveway, Andy thought those solar-powered mushroom lights might be good. Anyone have them? Brand to get or avoid?
depends on how much sun you actually get.
where I am, during winter solar lights are almost entirely useless.
you also need to clean them fairly often.
In the winter, they would get direct sunlight all day. In the summer they would be in dappled shade. I probably need the light more in the winter, though.
And I’d probably need to cover them, or remove them, when the oaks are in bloom. Oak trees drip nasty sticky black sap in bloom. Also enormous quantities of pollen, but the pollen is easy to clean off.
Try this.
Full Disclosure: I don’t know Tom from a hole in the wall.
but how much sun during winter is also a factor, if there’s only a several hours of actual daylight, and you need them to work from 5pm to midnight, they probably won’t work that long with the brightest setting.
I certainly wouldn’t expect them to last 7 hours. But a could of hours would be nice.
yes my point is depending on where you are, when you want them to last may not be optimal during winter, since the sun sets pretty early. so they may run out of juice pretty early.
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Subscribed. I bought some back in 2015 or so from Home Depot, and all of them failed pretty quickly. Some had replaceable batteries and they made it a second year and then they were kaput.
I’d buy some if I thought they have improved since then. Otherwise, I’m gonna wait until we do landscaping and do hard wired lights.
We’ve been hit-or-miss with solar lights. We had some that wore out pretty quickly (like a year or so). The ones we have now are going strong after about 2 years. Got them on sale at Costco. They last most of the night.
We recently did new concrete in the front yard and were planning on hardwired lights but it just didn’t make sense when we ran the numbers. The ones we have work fine for now.
We use the Home Depot generic ones. They last 2-3 years. Mine are not shaded at all and run about 6 hours. I put them away in the winter though. So I get a longer life span this way.
We bought some cheap ones at Sams. We have a long porch with a dim light and the step up to our porch was hard to see. Anyway we put one by the step and the others just in front of the house. They are not super bright but it does help with seeing that porch step.
We’ve had them for several years and they are fine. We do live fairly south.