Landscape Lighting vs. Solar Lights: What Actually Works in New England

Solar lights are cheap, easy, and widely available. They are also consistently disappointing in New England. Here is why, and what to use instead.

The Appeal of Solar

The pitch for solar landscape lights is simple: no wiring, no electrician, no monthly electricity cost. You stick them in the ground and they light up at night. For about $30 you can have 10 lights along your front walkway by Saturday afternoon.

We understand the appeal. We also hear from homeowners who tried solar first almost every week.

Why Solar Consistently Fails in New England

New England gets roughly 200 sunny days per year. The other 165 days are cloudy, overcast, or rainy, especially November through March. Solar lights depend on direct sunlight to charge. On a cloudy November day in Massachusetts, a solar fixture gets 20 to 30 percent of the charge it would get in June. By 9pm, it is dimming. By 10pm, it is off.

Winter days are short. In December, Massachusetts gets about 9 hours of daylight. Even on a clear day, the sun angle is low, which dramatically reduces the energy a solar panel can collect. The nights are longest exactly when solar performs worst.

Snow covers the panels. A solar fixture buried under two inches of snow does not charge at all. After a New England winter storm, your solar lights are dead until you go out and wipe off every panel by hand, which almost nobody does.

What Solar Actually Looks Like After One Winter

The plastic housing yellows and cracks in freeze-thaw cycles. The rechargeable batteries, which are typically cheap NiMH cells, degrade significantly after one or two winters. The stakes, which are pressed into the ground in fall, get heaved by frost and end up leaning at odd angles by spring. By year two, most homeowners are replacing solar lights that were already starting to fail.

What Low-Voltage LED Lighting Does Instead

Professional low-voltage LED landscape lighting is wired to your home's power. It performs identically in December as it does in June. It does not care how cloudy it is. It comes on at the same time every night and produces the same brightness every night, regardless of weather.

The electricity cost is minimal, a 20-fixture system with LED bulbs typically adds $10 to $20 per month to your bill. The fixtures, if they are solid brass, will last 20 years. The difference in light output between a quality LED landscape fixture and a solar stake light is not subtle. It is the difference between professional lighting and a toy.

The One Place Solar Works

Very remote areas where running wire is genuinely impractical, the back of a large rural property, for example, are where solar makes sense as a last resort. But for any front yard, walkway, or feature lighting on a typical Massachusetts or Rhode Island property, low-voltage wired LEDs are the correct choice every time.

Request a free design plan and we will show you what real landscape lighting looks like on your property.