Solar Living News

Outdoor landscape lighting comes in many forms with numerous uses. Primarily, you have a choice in the type of lighting you select and in many cases you can use a combination of both. For a bright constant glow you may choose low-voltage electrical landscape lighting. Although these lights are brighter they also come with a cost as monthly electrical bills will be impacted by this style of lighting. Furthermore, installing an electrical landscape lighting system is more complicated, requires various components, and offers less flexibility when comparable outside solar garden lights. The low voltage systems also depend upon an external electrical source.

No such complications exist with outdoor solar garden lights, the other primary style of landscape lighting for homeowners to consider. True, the intensity of a driveway solar light is not as bright as their low voltage counterpart, however cost of ownership, installation, and durability are superior to low-voltage electrical systems. Outdoor solar garden lights can be easily installed anywhere exposure to direct sunlight is available. Once a location is selected, solar garden lights also can be relocated with ease by simply removing the mount and reinserting into another location.

In many cases driveway solar lights and other solar powered pathway lights are mounted onto a ground stake that’s easily tapped into the ground. The driveway solar light fixture is then mounted on top of the stake and secured with a twist or snapping mechanism. Other outdoor solar lights can be mounted directly on top of the ground along curbing, on steps and stairs, and on other solid structures such as fences or posts. Typically, all mounting hardware for these various applications are included with the light fixture.

Low voltage systems reduce the electrical current from 120 volts to 12 volts by utilizing a transformer. Obviously this system requires external electrical access and the need to dig a trench about 3 or 4 inches deep to bury the electrical cable mounted to the lights and connecting to the transformer. The 12-volt system costs also must include not only the light fixtures but also the transformer and electrical cable. In addition to longer installation periods for this system, a homeowner also must consider other issues like potential voltage drops for lights installed furthest from the transmitter. There’s less flexibility with electrical systems as the lights usually need to be installed in line allowing for the connection of the power cable between lights.

Certainly low voltage systems do emit a consistent light throughout the night whereas solar powered outdoor landscape lights reduce in intensity throughout the night and are least bright as the sun rises. However, a homeowner needs to consider all options before installing a lighting system. Solar lights offer a softer glow but they continue to be a very suitable outdoor lighting option. When considering ease of installation, overall cost of ownership, environmental benefits, and flexibility to the homeowner, solar landscape lighting offers many significant advantages.

One very common method utilizing solar energy is through outdoor solar lighting providing aesthetic appeal and added safety features for the many homeowners who choose to take advantage of the free and clean power from the sun. Now the home improvement and garden lighting market is literally flooded with unique solar landscape lighting options. When outdoor solar lighting first evolved we had to use the plain can-style lights and there was literally no variety or style to choose from.

Now solar garden lights have evolved just like solar technology has to include many more varieties of lights, and styles for many outdoor tastes. Solar lights are now present in stepping stones, on fences, and around plenty of garden and water features. Solar driveway and pathway lighting is available in many styles and pleasing LED colors. The softer glow of solar lighting provides plenty of illumination to safely navigate in and around your landscape without the harsher intensity of landscape lighting from electrical systems.

Furthermore, installation is a snap with solar compared to electrical in-line systems. Solar lighting is much more versatile as it can be installed anywhere direct sunlight is present without the need for electrical access or trenching. Merely tap your solar landscape light post into the ground and mount your light fixture for constant maintenance free lighting. With electrical systems you may spend an entire day trenching and placing fixtures while trying to figure out the best way to bury electrical lines and power cords.

Now there are multiple applications for your outdoor solar lighting fixtures. These lights can now be mounted to hard surfaces and adjusted to display and various heights. Many can be mounted to existing posts or you can easily find elegant 19th century solar gas lamp style post light for an old fashioned appeal. Other varieties can be mounted at ground level around a pond or floating in a pond. If you are looking at solar landscape lighting you will have plenty of styles and options to meet your style and function. Once you have selected your outdoor solar powered lights, they operate cost free and maintenance free for many years. This cannot be said for electrical landscape lighting models.

There are modern advances in solar garden lighting to improve performance as well. Consider many models manufactured by Gama Sonic USA that includes their patented cone reflector. This cone shaped cylinder inside many solar driveway and pathway lights increases the brightness and longevity of the glow each night. You can now take your time and shop many stores and locations for a variety of solar landscape lights to fit your needs at very reasonable prices. You can certainly smile realizing that you are protecting your wallet and the environment when choosing solar.

The initial investment for solar panels may seem with high front-end overhead to be later offset by keeping the property long enough for it to pay off through the long-term cost savings of electricity. In the United States, there are many rebates and tax incentives that you can take advantage of to assist in offsetting the large front end costs for solar panel systems. Most power companies will offer a rebate for solar panel systems along with other federal program incentives. If you are planning to reside in your home for a long period of time a solar panel system will certainly pay for itself typically within about 5-8 years.

A positive certainty to your investment in solar panels is that once you purchase a system, your costs are basically fixed. In other words your cost for those panels is set as you have already paid for that energy by already purchasing the solar panels. The cost of electricity will continue to rise and significant increases are common as most consumers already realize. At some point you will end up paying less than non-solar users for the same amount of energy. How long it takes before you are paying less depends on how much your panels cost and how much you would have been paying if you continued to purchase electricity from your power company.

A ball park figure to install solar power to supply your home would roughly cost approximately $20,000 or about $10 per watt. If you are not up to this investment just yet, you can also use solar power to reduce costs for smaller household functions as well. For example you could purchase and install a small solar powered system that could power your computer and a couple of other small household appliances for about $800-$1,000.

If you use solar power to provide light in or around you home, such as outdoor solar garden lights, the light present is delivered through one or more LEDs or Light Emitting Diodes. The LED is specifically made to release light and to do it efficiently with minimal energy absorption. The diode itself is contained within a plastic casing designed to promote the release of light in a specific direction. A large portion of the light produced inside the casing bounces off the side walls before its release through the rounded end.

There are many great advantages to LEDs compared to conventional incandescent bulbs. The LED doesn’t include a filament that ultimately burns out requiring regular replacement. This resuts in an LED bulb lasts much longer often up to 20 times longer operating life. Strength and durability is also a factor as the tough plastic casing of the LED is much more damage resistant than traditional bulbs. Modern electronics also welcome LED bulbs much more than larger bulbs as they can be easily integrated into many designs where light is needed.

Beyond the physical advantages to the LED bulb, it is their energy efficiency that is most recognized. Incandescent bulbs emit lights thanks to the high generation of heat as the internal filament requires this to operate.  As a result a great deal of energy is expended to heat the filament for the production of light. Most of the generated heat escapes nor is it used to generate the visible light. Now LEDs inside your electronic devices or your solar powered garden lights generate barely any heat and just a small amount of energy is required to produce light. The end result is very beneficial to consumers as the cost and use of electricity is greatly reduced thus saving money and energy.

On a smaller scale most of us already realize that the use solar power already is common place with many home and business owners. Plenty of neighborhoods have outdoor solar garden lights for landscaping or solar panels on a rooftop is a frequent site, especially in states where sunlight is more frequent. The benefits and technologies of solar power are now present on a much larger scale.

Thinking beyond the backyard or other household appliances powered by solar energy, the solar thermal power plant is an amazing technology that can impact communities. These plants convert the sun’s energy into a useable heat source. This heat then boils water resulting in the release of steam to generate electricity through a turbine in a similar fashion to a nuclear power plant. This technology can benefit thousands of residents at a time serving entire communities with solar generated useable electricity.

Other solar power technologies being perfected including a method that utilizes mirrors to redirect sunlight onto an oil filled pipe. The heated oil then boils water for the generation of electricity. Mirrors are used in another technique in directing sun’s energy onto a collector which rests a receiver. A generator is then powered by molten salt that flows through the receiver.

Other technologies in use also includes less direct solar power uses such as the collection of solar energy through large windows allowing heat absorbing materials in the walls and floors of buildings to collect heat. At night this heat is released to maintain a steady temperature throughout the building. In a similar method heat absorbing poles installed on a rooftop can heat liquid in cylinders that provides a home with hot water.

If there are any negatives to the use and applications of solar power it may be due to costs and advancing solar technologies are expensive and they require large amounts of land in order to allow enough energy to be collected to impact an entire community. Thanks to new developing technologies and international recognition to the benefits of solar power, the push for using solar has increased by more than 20% since 1995. Solar panels used to be very expensive to develop but prices have dropped significantly and they are more efficient leading to the development of new major international markets. Cost incentives to go solar from our government permits the investment in solar electricity even more worthwhile allowing for a system to be paid for in five to ten years.

There are plenty of ways home and business owners can save money by making a few simple adjustments and taking advantage of cost saving opportunities available with green products. Not only are you playing nice with the planet, you will save money on your power bill every month. One adjustment comes in the form of those cool little curly light bulbs called the CFL or Compact Fluorescent Lamp. The old outdated and power draining incandescent bulbs have been around since Edison introduced them to the world but out with the old and in with the sheik new curly CFLs.

The old incandescent worked when electricity heated both sides of a carbon filament resulting in a light emission. A CFL bulb operates in a completely non related manner. The CFL is actually a closed glass tube with a fluorescent coating which glows when electrical current connects to the argon and mercury vapors inside the tubing.
True, incandescent bulbs are much cheaper upfront than the CFL bulb. However, using traditional bulbs will cost you much more in the long run with any significant use.
Incandescent bulbs wear out much quicker and they require substantially more electricity to operate. To compare, a CFL bulb, with average use will save you over $25 throughout its lifetime and will not need to be replaced unlike incandescent bulbs. The CFL will pay for itself in less than half a year.

It is also very interesting to view the electricity outputs for the CFL compared to the incandescent bulb. The same light emission for a 40-watt incandescent can be achieved with just 9 watts for the CFL bulb. You can replace a 100-watt incandescent with a 23 to 30 watt CFL.

This is a great way to conserve energy indoors and the same practices can be apply outside your home as well. As an alternative to electrical in-line systems you can easily install outdoor solar powered landscape lighting to save money and energy as well. These lights use Light Emitting Diodes (LED) that are completely poered by the sun.

Indoor or outside you can start your environmental and cost savings plan by simply changing your bulbs. Your wallet and your world will smile a little brighter.

We may say and act like we are environmentally conscious but truly, are we? We can save aluminum cans, recycle paper and plastics, use bio-degradable materials and we can conserve electricity just to name a few eco-friendly examples. Most people do not realize this but over 5% of all electricity consumed by Americans is wasted and that figure may go up two or three times that amount by 2010 according to estimates from the US Department of Energy.

If the United States is more environmentally aware than ever taking efforts to utilize green resources as a clean alternative to fossil fuels and other limited “dirty energy” sources like electricity, than how can we be so wasteful? The answer is painfully simple and obvious but overlooked by most Americans every day. A few simple adjustments in our daily routines combined with simple awareness would greatly reduce our daily waste of electrical power.

So what is cause of this wasteful practice? It is our use and dependence upon electronics in our daily lives. It is not the use that is so wasteful but the answer lies in the non-use of all of our electronic gadgets. You see even when our cell phones, DVD players, televisions, stereos, and other electronic devices remain in “off” mode they continue to draw small amounts of power as long as they remain plugged in to a power source. All of these electronic devices and many others do not turn off or power down while at rest, they remain in standby mode ready for the next use.

Over time this small amount of wasted standby power begins to add up significantly. Probably the most common example comes from our dependence on cell phones. Even when a phone is at full charge or when the phone is disconnected from the charger, the charger itself will continue to use electricity as long as it remains plugged into your wall socket.

Some electronics will continue to draw 30 or 40 watts during not in use. The biggest energy drains comes from old appliances. If you are still using a dated refrigerator from 10-15 years ago, that antique requires three times more energy to operate than a modern energy efficient refrigerator of the same size. Washing machines and hot water heaters that are old are not doing you any favors either when it comes to electricity conservation. Now solar power technologies can be utilized as a method of heating water within your home and many incentives to convert to a solar powered system are available. Outdoor garden lighting also does not require electricity as there are many solar landscape lights available on the market. For major appliances you may want to consider an upgrade to energy star models in the near future.

There are many simple steps and practices that we can use to promote energy conservation within our daily lives. Washing your clothes strictly in cold water and insuring proper insulation of your hot water heater are a couple of examples. If you are considering a new refrigerator, models with a top or bottom freezer compartment use up to 15% less energy than a side by side model. Also, you can skip the dry cycle on your dishwasher and turn off ceiling fans when you are gone. Unplug appliances where applicable such as the coffee maker and of course the cell phone chargers, toasters, TV, and any other electronics within reach. Everybody knows the curly fluorescent light bulbs are much more energy efficient than the traditional incandescent bulbs that are being phased out alltogether.

Please check out www.solarselectives.com featuring many other energy saving articles and information. Solar powered accent lighting is featured and many other solar energy articles and resources are available for review.