Solar landscaping lights have come a long way, They’re sleek, long-lasting, and bright as can be.
They’re also not going to make your home look good on their own.
You need to get creative with your solar landscape lights. Only lighting up your driveway or pathway?
That’s fine, but it’s not going to score you any points.
These outdoor solar light ideas will help spice up your landscape, and make things appear more aesthetic. Whether people are just driving by or you have guests arriving after dark, your home is going to stand out.
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1. Glowing Fences
You’ve got that perfect, beautiful fence that you installed, but it doesn’t show up at night. It’s just sort of there. If you don’t mind a little bit of drilling, you can install solar lights in the posts of your fence—who said that these just had to go in the ground, right?
Secure these solar lights on their stakes into the tops of your fence posts. If you don’t want to drill, that’s okay as well.
Simply use some weatherproof adhesive to apply the button of your solar light (without the pole) and apply it to the top of the posts. Keep in mind, this is going to be difficult when you have to remove it later.
These will gather sunlight through the day, and as night falls and hits that perfect peak, your fence posts will begin to glow. To make this as effective as possible, measure the distance between your fence posts, and get solar lights that are powerful enough to emit like that looks vibrant between these points.
If you really want to accent your fences, you can also get strip lighting (similar to RGB streamer lighting strips), and install them along the top cross beam of your fence.
These will shine down at an angle and illuminati the center of your center, right on down to the ground. This provides a nice effect, and most often, the solar panels for these can be affixed to the top of the posts to stay cohesive with the entire look.
2. Golden Road
LEDs are fascinating, and when you use them intelligently, they can be super powerful (even if their light rating and/or lumen output doesn’t agree). All you have to do is get creative.
For this, you’ll need a walkway that has sides made of pavers, walkway edges, or anything that you can affix small LEDs to. It just has to be raised off the ground by a few inches.
The goal here is to put small drill holes through either side of your pathway material, and run LED lights through them. Affix them using your adhesive of choice, and then run the wires through the back end. All these wires will link up and run back to a solar power ban, which can be housed indoors.
Use something like weatherproof tape to secure the wires, and then spray them with a waterproof coating to protect them from the rain. LEDs will light up your pathway from the ground, and perfectly light everything up without needing to be all that powerful.
Low-K value lights will provide a yellow-gold glow, which can really make your pathway feel alive. It’ll surely stand out more than pure white light.
3. Lantern-Lit Pathway
Simple enough, right?
You take a bunch of solar lights, you line a pathway with them, and you call it a day. Except that’s boring, and not what you’re here for. Instead of all that, you can make a design with these lanterns on the side of the path. They don’t have to go in a straight line.
If you measure these accordingly and have them far enough away from each other, you can invert them to give off different pulses of lights. It brings your landscape to life, but it also doesn’t make it look perfect. A little bit of asymmetry can help out every now and again.
Use this for the pathway leading from the sidewalk up to your front door, but you can also use this as a feature on the sides of your driveway. Any paths leading to the backyard will benefit as well, turning your home into this well-lit, cohesive space.
4. Trellis Spotlights
Having a trellis to go over your doorway or create an archway on your path is beautiful. There’s so much that you can do with it from vines to flowers and more. However… If you want this to work well, you need to make sure your trellis is trimmed enough for these lights to work.
There are small, circular lights that have solar panels on the top. These can hook onto things like gutters and fences, but if you do it right, you can hang them on either side of the trellis. Have multiple lights shining inward to create a glowing effect in the center of the trellis.
Alternatively, you can use these to create a halo effect on the outside of the trellis as well. IF your trellis isn’t very easy to spot, combining this with the center spotlights can really bring the space to life (it also makes it easier for the pizza guy to know where he’s going).
5. Container Garden Lighting
Container gardening is popular in southern areas where the ground might not be as hospitable to delicate plants as you would like. Your container gardening can seriously benefit from some solar lighting.
Utilizing individual 5W solar panels, and placing them accordingly, you can run their lines down to the area where your containers are.
This is usually on a deck or patio of some sort, but it can work just about anywhere. Run these into LED or RGB flexible strips. These can be manipulated to contour to the shape of your container edge.
They work for circular pots as well as square planters. Really, they work just about anywhere. Light up the rims of the containers and watch them glow at night. Either that, or you can light up the bottom of the pots where they touch the patio/deck like uplighting.
6. Flowing Rainbow
Did you know that most solar light lenses (plastic casings that light escapes through) can be colored?
You can remove them, color them safely, and change the way that light comes out of it. This usually works better on high-K value light outputs, but can even work for lower ones.
Color the lenses, and then return them. When the solar light kicks on, you’ll have a hue of the color you stained the lens with. This is your opportunity to do something unique that nobody else is doing. Even if your lights are arranged the same way as your neighbor’s, this is going to look completely different.
Light up your fence, your walkway, the edge of your property where it meets the street – make a living rainbow on your front lawn.
7. Window Uplighting
Window uplighting is when you have spotlight-styled lights that aim upwards, usually at a very slight angle (maybe 88°, so not a perfect line).
These don’t reflect off of your window to make a glare, but instead, they shine just enough light through the panes to offer some serious illumination.
Using solar panels that wire up to uplights, position them beneath your windows so they’re aiming upwards towards your home.
The line that runs to the solar panels needs to be protected, and for this to be aesthetic, they need to be concealed. Make sure there’s enough line to run it up the side of your home discreetly to wherever you have the panels located.
Position the uplights properly, and make sure they have enough power to actually light up your home. This might be tricky when you factor in the number of lights times the number of watts required to run them for eight hours at a time.
You will need an inverter and power bank to do this effectively, but it’s one of the most regal things you can do for your home to make it look absolutely fantastic.
8. Light-Up Birdhouse and Feeder
Made a birdhouse? Have a feeder or a bird bath in your front yard?
Yeah, you can even light these up.
For a birdhouse, you’re going to want to attach a small 5W panel to the roof. You can drill thin holes and run wiring through the inside of the birdhouse, just be sure to use glue or some kind of tape to keep it tied down so birds don’t peck at it.
The wiring can run to a few LED strips that skirt the outside of the birdhouse, or the underside of the angled roof.
For a bird bath, you can simply use uplight methods but with solar lantern-style lights. Angle them so that when they light up, it reflects on the birdhouse and illuminates it from the ground up. It’s simple, but effective.
9. Garden Bed Lighting
Remember those LED strips we talked about earlier? The maneuverable ones?
They work wonders in so many other areas. If your garden bed is a few feet out from your home and is flush with your foundation, then you’ve put a lot of time into it. Isn’t it a shame that it’s practically invisible at night?
Line these strips up along the fence, barrier, or line where the lawn abruptly turns into the garden bed. The best way to do this is use low-K lights (under 3000K) to have a slightly yellowish hue that reflects well on the greens of your garden. It’s like an outdoor mood light.
These also use up less power, so they won’t draw as much from your power bank. Garden bed lighting can normally be linked together, and wires can be buried, so if you have garden beds that aren’t connected to the house, you still have a chance to do this.
Illuminating Your Glorious Landscape
Now that you know what your solar lights can really do with a bit of creative design, what will you do? Did someone on this list jump out at you as a great idea, or did it help inspire your own solar landscape light idea?
Either way, you can grab the best solar landscape lights, disperse them properly, and make your home look amazing. Your landscaping is visible during the day, but with these, you’ll be able to showcase your glorious home at all hours.
