While summer is winding down everywhere else, San Francisco’s heat is simply arriving. For me, it’s the correct time to installation backyard lights.

I recently moved into a marvelous home with a horny yard, but a yard that takes somewhat time to take care of. I’ve been spending a terrific chunk of my weekends trimming, weeding and mowing it, and it makessense for me to get twice the enjoyment out it by highlighting it at night. The difficulty is, there are countless how you can light, at every price, starting with the fee of a sandwich and going up to the cost of a laptop. Here’s what I learned concerning the low end, the high end, and the sweet spot of lighting a yard well without spending a ton.

Those cheap lights? They’re cheap for a reason.

I started with a 10 pack of Solar pathlights for $30 (Amazon) made by a corporation called Moonrays. Each packs an LED, a rechargeable battery, charging panel and are set to fireside up when the veil of darkness drops. I threw em together, staked them into the ground (cracking the plastic on one out of the 10 in the course of the install process) and charged em within the sun all day. Easy.

But come night, it gave the look of there were 9 fairies twinkling out behind my house-or that a number of errant bits of stardust had fallen out of the sky. Sure, the Moonrays are bright enough to inform you there’s an LED glowing on your yard. And they offer you the vague notion of some green things dimly silhouetted nearby. But they suck.

To throw some dramatic lighting on the trees, I also picked up Malibu’s ” brightest spot lights.” The set amounted to 3 uplights, each connected to a remote panel with batteries by 20 feet of wire. They were $50, and they were such as good, natural moonlight. In other words: pretty poor. Like the Moonrays, the Malibus shone blue enough that I spotted the coldness of the light without comparing it to warmer traditional incandescent lights.

The high end

In some unspecified time in the future during my research, I discovered that my yard has a lighting box arrange by the previous owners (and their excellent landscaping company, Breaking Ground ). The box, by Luminaire FX , houses a very robust 300 watt transformer that may be simultaneously set to a timer and photovoltaic trigger, and has separate power rails for 11, 12, 13, and 14 volts to adjust for the ability degradation over long runs. Neat. It was only a question of wiring up the box during the yard and picking the fixtures.

I got some path lights and uplights from a similar company. I also opted to retrofit the 25 watt lamps uplights with 5 watt LEDs. They cost below going for out of the box LED lamps and use about 75-80% less power. The 4 lamps cost about $80 each and the LED bulbs ran about $25, from my local DIY lighting/garden supply store, Urban Farmer . Running the line, stabbing the lights into the ground, and wiring everything using silicon filled wire nuts and covering the joints with zip tied plastic bags only took me about 30 minutes. That even included burying the line under mulch. I set the lights up to the 11 volt rail because, actually, my LEDs weren’t ready to vary brightness, and anything over 11 volts gets expended as heat energy.

When night came, I saw the leaves of my trees from in the house, and the lawn looked inviting enough to lie down on, had the dew not set. The LEDs weren’t blue, and had really uniform lighting patterns. I am proud of this install, but I found out some important things concerning the wide gap between professional grade set ups and the 3 dollar path lights I started with.

The middle ground and the reality about solar

So those cheap lights I got? They’re actually the traditional wherein all other solar pathlights are measured by. They’re rated at 1.2 lumens and at Home Depot , you may get pieces of varying output rated at 3x, 5x, 6x and even 24x of the 3 dollar variety. I spent 24 dollars on a pair from Hampton Bay rated at 6x-I’d guessed 24x can be overpowering and at $50 each, approaching the associated fee of a wired established. They were adequate for the side of the yard I preferred to keep more dimly lit.

So, you will have options in solar, for pathlights, to be able to pay for them. But for uplights, your options are limited.

The guys at Urban Farmer told me that both they and home depot sell advanced solar lighting systems that cost $200-$300 for a 10-30 watt panel that has to be mounted on a fence or a roof to catch optimal sunlight, and a car battery sized dry cell that has to be stashed somewhere. Even then, you’re talking about only powering 3-5 higher output LED lights-or 10 high-end LED pathlights-for a couple of hours at night. And you’ll emerge as recycling the battery one day, although you are taking your lighting system off the grid.

For that cost and hassle you may wire a yard with a cheaper version of my wired established. Home depot sells kits of 4 lights, plus little transformers for $180 and up. The variations are these kinds of kits aren’t LED driven, and the transformers don’t do neat tricks like supply varying voltage to increase brightness or decreased voltage to extend bulb life. There’s also the matter of quality. The type you’ll find at home depot, compared to the type I got at Urban Farmer don’t look nearly as weatherproof, don’t look as nice, and feel cheaper overall because they’re made up of aluminum or powder coated steel versus copper or bronze. And the warranty of the FX stuff, at 10 years for the transformer and 3 years for the fixtures, beats the everyday 1 year guarantee.

The final analysis for all of that is you could break out with cheap solar path lights which might be rated for no less than 6x the output of the most cost effective kind. But you’re probably better off going for a wired setup-even though a cheaper kind- in case you have to do any kind of significant lighting involving uplights. And in case you’re worried about being greener you might want to just go LED. There’s no debate there, provided that you know what color your LEDs can be.

Home Mod is all in regards to the biggest gadget any of us will ever hack.

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This post is tagged: correct time, dramatic lighting, incandescent lights, rechargeable battery, sweet spot, vague notion, veil of darkness