This morning, a package arrived for me containing a pair of decent-looking garden solar lights from Linkind (I’m a bit surprised their main website prefix as detailed in their manual is http, not https but the actual website is fine). Straight up I should say I’d never heard of Linkind until recently – but these (StarRay G2 Series 2-pack) look a little better than the average Chinese solar light.
I say the above with a caviat: it will take some time to be sure that these lights stand up to the weather. My biggest problem with solar lights in general is the weather. I’ve no real idea what the weather is like in China but here in Southern Spain we get HOT summers (by which I mean 40c or higher at peak (in the shade) and the winters can get very cold (-5c or lower) – but typically not wet, quite the opposite of the Northeast of England where it is invariably damp – which ensures very few solar lights last more than a year.
A slight aside: We’ve had thunderstorms this week (May 2023) in much of Andalusia and in fact some cheap colour solar lights I bought at a local store last week are already in trouble. In this case they came as a set of 20 small glass containers with one LED in each – and a separate solar -powered controller.
Water immediately got into the glass bottles and as soon as the rain stopped, I brought the lights inside, dried them out and added some silicone sealant where the LED connects in the glass – to no avail as two days later the same lamp was again wet inside. You have to wonder what the designers were thinking. Hence my concerns.
So, after that aside, back to the Linkind lights – they are currently charging in the garden having had a successful night lighting the place up brightly.
I like the look of the lamps – 22 decent-looking white LEDS in each and the solar panel is certainly large enough.
Note the powerful-looking LED output (see night shot above – 3am) – the button allows for 3 power settings with varying run times accordingly – I am currently running these lamps on full power – reasonable given the average sunlight levels we get here in Spain.
The manual is helpful and in clear English and also German in the package I received.
The units can be stuck in the soil or mounted on a wall or roof using the fittings supplied. The whole lot came boxed as a pair and well packed. Each unit is powered by a standard 18650 3.7v lithium battery and the 22 LEDS in each lamp are warm 3000K.
And with a few days use I think I can safely say these lights are ok, the solar panels are not good enough to keep these in the shade – they really do need a good day’s worth of direct sunlight.