When you want to choose a suitable solar led street light for outdoor lighting projects, you will find that there are too many solar street lamps styles on the market. The price of these solar street lights ranges from tens of dollars to hundreds of dollars or even more expensive. So in this article, our purpose is to let you spend less money to choose the best solar street light for your solar streetlight project.
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Solar street light classification
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Four main components
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Evaluation typs of popular solar street lights
Outdoor Solar street lights Classifications
In appearance, we can divide solar street lights into integrated solar street lights, all in two solar street lights and split solar street lights.
All-in-one street lights are also called all in one solar street lights, which means that all components are made in one shell. The advantage of the integrated solar light is easy to install. Semi-split solar lights are solar panels installed separately, and other accessories are all in one shell.
According to the quality, the solar lighting system can also be divided into low-voltage system (3v) and high-voltage system (12/24V). 3v solar lights are usually used in cheap low-wattage retail solar lamps. High-quality solar street light projects usually require a 12/24V system.
Four Mains Solar Light components
Solar lights diagram
The picture above is the circuit diagram of all solar lights. All solar lights must contain four components: solar panels, batteries, controllers, and LED lights.
Solar panels are components for generating electricity, and most solar street lights have monocrystalline solar panels.
The solar charge controller is to control the coordinated operation of the solar panel, battery and LED three accessories. Solar controllers are generally divided into pwm controllers and mppt controllers. The efficiency of the MPPT controller in rainy weather is higher than that of the PWM controller.
The battery is the energy storage component of the solar lamp system. At present, most solar light batteries are lithium batteries. Lithium batteries can be divided into LiFePO4 and LiMn2O4.
LED is now known as the third-generation LED light source. It is precisely because of the high luminous efficiency of LED that the cost of solar street lights is greatly reduced. At present, in 2022, the luminous efficiency of LED chips can be as high as 200 lumens per watt.
How to Choose The Best Solar street lights / Types of solar street lamps Reviews
Here we have listed several popular solar outdoor street lights and evaluated them from different aspects, including brightness, lighting time, and lifespan.
In the market, this types of solar lights are labelled 100W to 400W. The real led power is 5W to 15W. And all the solar lighting parts are cheap and only for 2 yeas lifespan. This kind of lamp basically uses a 3V low voltage system. It is popular among home/house lighting, community and country road. As the solar lights manufacture, the regions to buy this lamp are usually in Southeast Asia, Africa and South America.
In the market, this types of solar lights are labelled 30W to 200W. The real led power is 3W to 10W. The application place and target countries of this type solar lamps is similar as above type solar lights.
This is the most popular solar street light which is called “all in one solar street lights“. The real led power of this type can be 5W to 100W. The application place of this types can be goverment solar street lighting projects, parking lot lighting. And we did the projects in USA, AUSTRALIA, DUBAI AND SPAIN.
Such lamps are also used in high-quality solar lighting systems. No matter the price, brightness, lighting time and life span are not much different from the integrated solar street lights. Our customers in Europe and North America will also need this kind of solar light design.
How to customize design Solar led Street Lights
The picture on the left is a solar street light project we made according to customer needs in Texas, USA. (Click here to see more of our custom solar light projects)
If it is a custom solar street light, first we will consider the installation location. For example, in small roads or communities with little traffic, the requirements for lighting time and brightness do not need to be too high. The main road with large traffic flow requires strict lighting brightness and lighting time (click here to learn how to improve the lighting time of solar street lights).
Secondly, we will determine the lumen value of the LED light according to the height and brightness requirements of the street light pole. Note that this is in lumens, not watts. Because the direct parameter that determines brightness is lumen value, not wattage. And we will use Led with high lumen efficiency as much as possible to save the cost of solar panels and batteries. If the project requires, we will provide renderings (click here to view our lighting design drawing service).
Road lighting dialux simulation
In the third step, we will determine the size of the solar panel and battery according to the power and lighting time of the led street light. The battery generally uses a lithium battery, which is small in size and light in weight. Lithium batteries and solar panels are also the two most expensive components of solar lamps.
All types of solar street lights Review
When you want to choose a suitable solar led street lig…
