How can I make my solar lights stay ON longer? 4 ways

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Solar lights are a great way to illuminate your home or garden but they can be frustrating if your solar lights are not staying long enough in the night?

If you’ve been wondering How can I make my solar lights stay ON longer? then you have come to the right place.

In this guide, I will share some practical tips how to make your solar lights stay ON longer.

Key Takeaway: To make solar lights stay ON longer in the night you can replace solar panels, replace the rechargeable batteries with higher capacity ones, keep them OFF during the day, and set them in right position.

How long should solar lights stay on?

An average solar light is supposed to illuminate for 8 to 10 hours in the night but the actual output of solar lights totally depends on various other factors like sunlight, batteries, panels used, etc.

All of these factors are interdependent which hugely impact the output of solar energy LED lights.

Why do my solar lights only stay ON for a few hours?

You solar lights are staying ON for a few hours only because either the batteries installed in your solar lights are of less capacity or the number of LEDs on the lights are more than the capacity of the batteries or your solar lights batteries are not charging to their full capacity.

How to make solar lights stay on longer?

Now after learning about the possible reasons which are making your solar lights to not stay for long in the night and turn OFF so quickly its time to look at the solutions.

There are four solutions to make solar powered lights stay ON for long in the night time. I have shared all the four solutions below.

Replace solar panel

The first solution that you can do with your solar lights is replacing lower watt solar panels with higher wattage solar panels.

A higher wattage solar panel will be able to produce more Ampere resulting in sufficient charging of the solar lights batteries.

Alternatively if you don’t want to remove and replace the solar panels from your solar lights then you can take one more solar panel of higher wattage and connect it to the existing solar panel in parallel.

Here I found a comment of a user on a Youtube video regarding connecting the panels in parallel.

Replace battery with a higher capacity one

Second thing you can do to make your sun energy powered LED lights ON for long duration is replace the batteries with a higher capacity ones.

If your solar lights are not staying ON for long it might be because of low charge storage capacity of the solar lights batteries.

You can replace the low mAh batteries with higher mAh. Alternatively if you don’t want to remove and replace the batteries than you can attach more batteries to your solar lights in parallel to increase their capacity.

If your solar lights have NiCd batteries you can also change them to better and higher capacity ones like NiMH rechargeable batteries.

Keep lights in switch OFF mode

Third thing you can do to increase the ON duration of your solar LEDs is to keep them in OFF mode and switch ON only in the night.

Why I am saying this is because sometime you might have seen that solar lights come up during the day due to clouds, shade, etc. This discharge the batteries and as of this less charge is available for the night.

To prevent this situation keep your solar powered lights in OFF mode and switch them ON only in the night.

Although this might seem a hassle but if you are really struggling with your solar lights duration you can try this too.

Change position

Fourth solution that you should try is changing the position of your solar lights. Solar lights are charged best at some angled depending upon the latitude of your place.

Incorrectly placed solar lights will not be able to get sufficient sunlight during the day resulting in less charging of the rechargeable batteries and less output in the night.

Conclusion

Solar lights are a great way to bring light to your home and outdoors like garden, lawn, etc. without using grid electricity. They are supposed to work for the whole night but if they are not staying ON for long in the night it can be frustrating.

Using the solutions I provided above you can increase the working hours of your solar lights easily.