My wife, Efiwym, loved her solar outdoor lighting. We had a myriad of types of solar lights throughout the years. Usually the batteries would not recharge, or the weather did a number on the finishes of the lighting. Efiwym would do her annual spring troubleshooting to get the solar lights to work. She would replace the batteries, if she could, or just go buy a new set of lights.
My involvement with solar lights started a couple of years ago, I wanted to put out our flag more than just on the federal holidays. If I was going to leave it up at night, I needed a light for it. I shopped around for a solar spotlight that had enough lumens to illuminate the flag from dusk to dawn. I found one that was not too pricey but would work.
The light had a separate solar panel, that you could place up to six feet away from the spotlight. I started off by installing the spotlight on the ground pointing upward towards the flag. I could not adjust the spotlight so it would flood the flag with light.
With the help of wire ties, I then installed the spotlight on the porch post where the flag was placed. I wanted to make sure this location would work before I drilled holes into the post. I knew I would need to remove the flag in winter, because I could not get the power of the sun to keep the flag lit, (especially under snow). When it came time to put away the spotlight for winter, I clipped off all the wire ties and removed it. The following year, I would screw the spotlight to the post.
The problem with the solar lights we bought, the batteries were incapable of lasting until dawn. My flag and our front sidewalk would be left in the dark for one to two hours. That needed to change.
It took 35 years to repair the GFCI outlet on the side of the house that I installed when I ran wiring for our front yard lamp post. While the post lamp worked fine, the GFCI did not. Last year, I tackled the problem. I replaced the old GFCI and it just took me to put the wires in the right terminals for it to work.
Since I now had an outside outlet, running low voltage lighting was a possibility.