Little Help With Commercial Solar Street Lamps...

[Ken Fields]

Spring has sprung (maybe), the ground up at our house in CT has mostly thawed (I hope)... and have a number of projects I'd like to do on the property. This weekend I've been researching solar street lights, we have a very long driveway (off the main road, down into a valley, at the base of a small (New England sized) "mountain" - very twisty turny...

I would love to put up a couple lights to help navigating on those particularly dark evenings. The little "solar post lamps" like the ones found on amazon are not going to be bright enough, so I was thinking the larger mid-size commercial scale lights.

I've been checking out a bunch of companies and a bunch of their specs, they all having lighting and lumens, battery box, etc... but for some reason no mention of an inverter, or whether it's a DC light. Not that it particularly matters, as long as the light works, but it's kind of driving me crazy... do these things have inverters? Are they in the battery box? Are they in the pole? What's the story?

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Ken
Lime Light Renewable Energy (http://www.limelightpower.net)

[Dave Turpin]

K.I.S.S. Why use an inverter when lights work fine on DC? The original Edison invention was DC, Tesla simply made production and delivery more efficient with AC.

You can make you own solar street lights. You need a solar panel of sufficient size to fully charge the battery during daylight, a battery large enough to supply the light during the entire night, a small charge controller with a DC output, and a DC light of sufficient brightness. Also a photocell to turn the light on/off. The engineering is reverse, of course. Select the light, then the battery, then the panel. All matched voltage, of course.

[Ken Fields]

I am actually debating whether or not to do it on my own... a) because I like having the satisfaction of knowing how things work and b) because quite frankly all the designs out there kind of suck (excuse my french)...

So the lack of complete stats and whether or not there was an inverter was kind of driving me crazy, quite simply because i was looking for answers on the spec sheet and no one was giving me the more detailed explanation I was kind of personally craving...

Ken

[Dave Turpin]

I have seen some pretty dumb designs, too. Most use LEDs so you get a light with terrible output. There are even wind-powered street lights out there. Wind power 10 feet off the ground? Please.

My complaint with any commercially-available solar light is that they all seem to assume you live in the middle of a field in Arizona. Every one I have seen should have about 4x the silicon to work right.

[Ken Fields]

And I definitely do NOT live in Arizona (although after this winter...). Fortunately I don't need a lot of light - I just need something sturdy and bright enough to sort of give enough light to see the hill and the dips n turns in the road, something so that we can see the ice when the road freezes (which it does, have slid off the road a couple times over the years). Fiance and I are talking about kids soon, so I feel this is also a safety issue for all of us...

I've seen the street lamp wind turbines, I guess they're a nice idea, but couldn't imagine them being too effective.

Still shopping options.

Ken