Solar Outdoor Lighting Options

Accent Lights

• If you're looking to illuminate a small area of your yard primarily to add a mood-enhancing accent, a range of solar lamps may fit the bill. For a festive decorative touch, you can hang solar string lights. For an unusual tabletop lamp with an old-fashioned touch, buy a solar-powered outdoor lamp that emits a warm light from a housing that looks just like a mason jar. For colorful accents, several manufacturers make solar-powered lights modeled after paper lanterns in a range of bright hues. If you plan to keep your accent lights on tabletops or hanging from the rafters within a gazebo, patio or other covered location, check that they receive enough sunlight during the day to keep them charged by evening when you want to enjoy their glow. The lamp's solar panel may be attached by a cord or built into the unit itself.

Path Lights

• You may wish to focus your outdoor lighting along a footpath or walkway, illuminating just enough to protect yourself and your house guests from tripping over the rose bushes or walking into the birdbath. A number of solar-powered outdoor lamps are designed specifically to this end, providing low-intensity coverage from a series of low-to-the-ground lamps, each with a hood to gently angle the light downward. Usually, the lamps are either set into the ground or hung from a pole. One advantage of solar path lights over traditional electrified lamps is their flexibility; because no wiring is required, as soon as you move a footpath, you can easily move the lamps as well.

Security Lights

• As solar-powered cells remain a far more recent innovation than electricity, lamps with higher intensities remain the last frontier for solar technology. However, you can find outdoor solar lights that throw an ample and intense swathe of light. Usually these high-intensity lamps will come with a larger solar panel or a set of multiple panels. A bit of strategic landscaping can conveniently hide the panels from view. To most effectively use the solar energy stored from during the day, outdoor solar lights may use motion sensors to shine only when necessary.