Solar lighting is becoming a new trend in illuminating your garden, patio or driveway. It has many advantages above string lighting but the best part is that it is good for the environment too. However, most people are still using string lights instead of outdoor solar lights because of several reasons. Although solar lighting is a new trend, it still has a long way to go before it can become a worthy replacement for string lights.
Using string lights is going the conservative way, we are using it for years and it provides us with what we want. String lighting provides us with all the light intensities that we want and we can get bulbs, lanterns in all sorts and types that we like. The main reason why it still is more popular than solar lighting is probably because it is well known and cheap!
The use of solar lights indeed has some big advantages but the main disadvantage is that it is quite expensive when you compare the two. Your average solar lantern or solar pole will not emit enough light to illuminate a larger area and that is why you will need several of them where you only need one or two string lights to get the same effect.
Solar lights are not as energy efficient as string lighting and you need a whole lot of energy in order to let them emit light that is bright enough to illuminate your surroundings. The disadvantage of this is the fact that when there is not enough sun light your solar light batteries will not get charge and not emit enough light. Another limitation of this is that you always have to place the bulbs faced to the sun, you can not place them in shady areas.
The result of its limitations is that it is now primarily used for improving aesthetics to your home exterior. If you want to illuminate your patio, driveway or garden than the best way to do it is using the best of both worlds.