delusionofgrandeur

You’ve probably seen them, you may own some, perhaps you’ve even tripped over one…

Solar Powered garden lamps seem to be practically everywhere these day illuminating small spots of grass with their relatively asthmatic led bulbs. Admittedly from the angle of light pollution, these devices are quite low polluters but they are, none the less, kitsch.

Now, you’ll have heard, whether you know it to be true or not, the argument that solar panels (photovoltaics) never produce more power than it takes to manufacture them. This is, of course, false. A photovoltaic panel on it’s own would probably pay back it’s manufacturing energy cost in a few years of use. In terms of solar kitsch however, this is not the whole story.

Solar garden lamps have several other components, the most obvious being the ultra-cheaply produced plastic casing which becomes brittle after perhaps just one season of use. Then there is the charge-controller and it’s often integrated led lamp which often has insufficient protection to avoid the tracks and solder joints from oxidising. Finally, there are the rechargable batteries which are more often than not the cheapest that money can buy. Each of these components can cause the failure of the whole lamp and as with so much other kitsch, I suspect that once it is broken, it is discarded.

Now that’s a shame. That solar panel in the top of the lamp may have paid back it’s manufacture energy alone during the lamp’s lifetime but it is probably still some years from paying for the thermoplastics, circuits and batteries that make up the rest of the lamp.

There’s probably nothing wrong with the solar panel itself. A photovoltaic is a relatively simple and very robust device which could last 40 years or more, constantly producing power when exposed to the sun. It makes me cringe to think how many of these small solar panels have ended up in landfills already simply because they were attached to fashion-fad kitsch.

If you were to salvage those panels however, it would be trivial to build them into large arrays to produce useful power for years to come.

So, whatever you do with your solar kitsch, save those panels!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 12:56 pm and is filed under General.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.