Benefits and Drawbacks of Indoor Solar Lights

Before we wrap up this post, let’s take a look at a few of the positive and negative aspects of solar lights.

Easier than running electricity

Running electricity to a shed, garage, or porch that isn’t already wired for lighting is expensive and time-consuming. Depending on the complexity, you might even need to hire an electrician to do the job, adding even greater expense. Solar lights though are cheap and easy to install. Just buy the kit, hang the light where you want, and run the wiring for the solar panel outside.

Environmentally friendly

With 30% coming from coal and 34% coming from natural gas, replacing even your little LED lightbulb in our example above with a solar equivalent saves about 12 pounds of CO2 each year, depending on your state’s exact generation mix.

Shifting even some of your electricity generation to a cleaner source will lower your personal impact on the environment and help to drive down the prices of similar eco-friendly products such as solar lanterns. Supporting green technology with your wallet can make a difference in more ways than one!

Great for emergency situations

Unlike our normal house lights, solar lights don’t need the utility or grid to work. As long as you have sunlight, your solar light will work! This can come in very handy in emergency situations, like hurricanes or tornadoes. You certainly don’t want to use it in this manner, but it’s critical to have that backup when you do need it.

Hard to scale

These solar lights are great, but there is one drawback. If you ever decide you want to add a few new lights, you’ll need to buy an entire set-up again. These indoor solar light kits simply aren’t very scalable.

The solar panels are sized to provide just enough power for the included light. If you have a large space to brighten up, you’ll need several kits, which quickly becomes overly complicated. In this situation, instead of buying 5 kits, it’s probably better to just buy a larger solar panel and battery storage, then connect multiple lights to that system.

With that being said, no one is really using these lights to light up their entire home. If you’re just looking to brighten up a small shed, these kits are absolutely perfect. They’re cheap, easy to install, and provide good lighting with the LEDs.