AliExpress (Chinese) LED Solar Street Lamp Style Motion Lights

36 LED solar motion lights!

These solar lights are marketed as "street lights". They can be ordered with or without a post, and I've been looking at them for a while. I paid about $13 a piece without the extension rod, and tonight we put them up on the dark side of the garage that has NO light whatsoever.

Christmas 2017!

Replace Energy Sucking Landscape Floodlights with LED for $1

Have low-voltage flood lights around your house? I do... 13 of them.

At 20 watts a bulb, that's a lot of energy consumption for all intents and purposes, decorative lighting.

You can easily retrofit these kits and fixtures with LED light bulbs from big box stores, but you will be paying for them, to the tune of about $7 per bulb.

Standard, incandescent 20 watt bulb vs energy efficient LED

I'm happy to share that I've found an alternative to the expensive bulbs from Home Depot and Lowe's! These cost from 90 cents to about a dollar a piece. That's a savings of hard, cold cash and a whopping 17 WATTS per light!

G4 LED COB 3W warm or cool white bulb.

Did I mention they are available in cool or warm white? Here's pictures after installation:

Back garage line, 3 lights

Side of house, 3 lights

Buy them here: G4 LED COB 3W warm or cool white bulb.

The planet, and your wallet, will thank you.

More Halloween! Our Front Yard

To get into the spirit of the season this year, we have to really ignore the stupid warm, sticky weather and press on.

For our *first* year in the Cape, we decorated the front of our house in black light and UV reactive stuffs!

I'm sharing a couple of daytime pictures and hope to be able to get out and get some great night pictures soon. I'm really waiting for the tree in the front yard to drop some leaves.

 

What glows? Spiderweb, spiders, bats, ghosts, skeletons dancing on their own headstones... it's ace!

I'm going to put together a quick write up on how to make things blacklight responsive, because the "glow in the dark" items from Dollar Tree didn't really... you know... GLOW.

Ugh... I'm Doomed to be in the Dark

We have a really, REALLY dark backyard. There aren't any lights on the 1.5 car garage, so we have spent some time shopping around to remedy that.

We decided we'd like something energy efficient, and dusk to dawn would be a plus, or maybe motion detection.

I finally found a really cool "twin light" product at Menards. They mount on the wall, have a 3w LED that gives light equivalent to a 25 watt bulb that comes on from dusk to dawn. If the motion beam is broken, it lights up a brighter CFL bulb. They're awesome!

We've been eagerly awaiting their arrival and sure enough, my little bundles of joy arrived today.

Our mailman, Good Guy Greg, being gingerly with the lights...

But... uh oh... Menard's literally shipped them, simply taped together, in their RETAIL PACKAGING!!

I didn't have a real good feeling, so I opened one and Guy the other and natch... both broken.

I'm seriously bummed about this. They weren't the cheapest lights ever and to ship them in retail packaging is plain careless. Fail.

Boo.