Spotlight: Solar Powered Outdoor String Lights for Pool and Yard Decoration

The solar collector sat on the wooden deck next to a plate of spaghetti and a record by Stan Getz. For eight hours the sun projected its heat onto the dark silicon surface. I watched a cat sleep under the bushes while the battery stored the energy of the afternoon. When the clock reached seven and the shadows stretched across the grass, the copper wire inside the plastic tube began to glow. The lights maintained their intensity until the early hours of the morning when the dew started to form on the glass of my window. There was no heat from the bulbs and no sound from the controller and no interruption in the flow of electricity.

A woman from a small town in Michigan wrote that the lights survived a storm that moved her patio furniture into the neighbor's yard. Let’s face it, most people expect a product that costs less than a lunch to fail when the weather turns cold. The feedback from various owners suggests that the thickness of the plastic protects the internal wiring from the teeth of squirrels. Another person mentioned that the glow reminded them of the lights in a subway station in a city they had visited once. The bulbs do not burn out like the filaments in a lamp and they keep their color after months of exposure to the elements.

The technology relies on the movement of electrons within a semiconductor. When the sun hits the panel, it creates a current that moves through the circuit to a storage cell. This energy remains trapped until a sensor detects the absence of light. Then the battery releases the power to the LEDs which produce photons through the process of electroluminescence. The PVC housing acts as an insulator and a shield against the humidity and the dust and the oxygen in the air.

The length of the wire reaches ten meters from the panel to the final bulb. It uses a voltage of one point two volts and a battery with a capacity of six hundred milliampere hours. The tube has a diameter that allows for flexibility around a fence post or a tree trunk or a balcony rail. The box contains the spool of lights and the grounding stake and the mounting bracket. Each LED is spaced at a distance that ensures an even distribution of the glow across the entire length of the strand.

Compared to the glass orbs that shatter on the concrete, these plastic tubes possess the toughness of a tire. The light does not have the glare of a halogen bulb but it offers the soft illumination of a jukebox in a dark bar. I’m still wrapping my head around the way the sun can power a party in the middle of a forest without a single plug in a wall. The red and the blue and the green and the yellow bulbs change the atmosphere of the yard until it looks like a place where a ghost might stop to rest. The copper is hidden inside the plastic and the plastic is hidden inside the night.