I learn some lessons the hard way, usually by way of stubbornness.   I hate the idea of just throwing things that break away, even if the cost of buying it in the first place was cheap. But I have spent too much money and time trying to fix a bunch of cheap solar lawn ornaments only to find that despite my best efforts none of them were fixable.

First came the solar powered tiki lamps…

I immediately fell in love with the idea of having backyard lights that ran off solar.   Whimsical decoration seemed wasteful to be running off the electrical grid, especially in the summer months when the city grid is already stressed.   And I wanted my little alleyway backyard to be lively.   The moment I laid eyes on these at the hardware store I had to have them.

At first they really did the trick.   But after several rains the first generation of Casa del Garrett solar tiki lamps started to fail.   When the first one did I examined its construction, opened it up and poked at it with a multi-meter and determined that the little CDS photocell that switched the circuit from Charge The Battery to Shine The Lights had gone bad and I actually went to a Radio Shack (amazingly the chain still sells parts) and bought replacements and soldered them in.   Worked for a while but then something else failed in the tiny circuit board and that was that.   But, typical Bruce, instead of just tossing the bad ones I saved them for parts. Next year I bought new ones and discovered they’d changed the design and now they didn’t use CDS cells to switch on the lights, they apparently figured out when nighttime came from the voltage coming off the solar cell.   Okay, thinks I, that’s a better design and maybe I can use those spare CDS cells I have now for some other future project.   This is how hoarding nightmares begin I guess.

Next year I bought some more solar ornaments.   The makers were getting creative and I kept seeing things I wanted for the backyard…

These all failed eventually too, either due to rainwater getting inside and corroding the electronics or from overheating in the direct sunlight. (who’d have thought solar powered lawn ornaments would be exposed to direct sunlight…right?).   This year when I began waking up the backyard from its winter slumber, most of my solar ornaments were dead.   Stubbornly I resolved to fix everything rather then trash what stopped working and buy new.   But despite my best efforts at reviving them most would not light anymore, or hold a charge for very long and some things died tragically on the operating table. The tiki lamps were the worst, but everything I tried to fix this year ended up dead. It seems while this stuff is sold for outdoor use, it is not made for outdoor use.

Meanwhile I had spent lots of money on parts, acrylic paint because these things also fade drastically in the sunlight (who’d have thought solar powered lawn ornaments would be exposed to direct sunlight?) and a new soldering gun for cutting into the hot glue gobs that hold these things together.

But the worst of it was all the time I spent trying to fix these things.   Hours and hours and hours of poking and cutting and soldering and repainting things that I eventually had to throw away anyway because I could not get them working again. Wires that were too tiny to suffer more than factory assembly would come apart in my hands. Batteries would simply stop recharging because the circuit boards had suffered too much water damage, or were failing due to heat buildup from sitting outside all day long in the direct sun (who’d have thought solar powered lawn ornaments would be exposed to direct sunlight?).   And now I’m kicking myself for having spent too many hours of my life this summer trying to fix junk when I had so many other projects around the house that needed my attention too.

I bought this stuff because I liked they way it decorated my backyard.   Instead of some dark city rowhouse alleyway yard I had something that livened up the place and looked nice to the eye.

It’s hard to admit defeat but I tell myself that throwing plastic junk away these days isn’t so bad since the city has a recycling program.   Maybe some of this stuff will come back as something more useful and long lasting.   Plastic trash cans maybe.

I still want light and fun in my backyard, so now I’m looking around for things that run off the same sort of low voltage wiring that path lights use.   I have two lighted water fountains out back now that run off the grid. I had to repaint one of those before deploying it this season but that’s not so bad a task. The solar stuff is junk. If you go with that then expect to have to replace it every season and don’t be surprised if some of it doesn’t even make it to the end of the summer you bought it. The idea of this stuff running off solar is nice but a carbon foot print is not greatly reduced by products that only last one or two seasons and then they have to be thrown away or recycled.