To bring some new ideas for your outside lighting, we have some rather unique ideas to share with you here. Now mind you, we’re talking about smaller garden light type outside lighting; something that illuminates better than your traditional outside solar lights (which typically don’t give off much light at all, much less for very long). What we are not talking about is security lights for the home or floodlights to allow you to shoot hoops well past sunset. Instead, we’re talking about fun, decorative lights primarily used for one of two purposes. Either temporarily for some kind of unique get together like a backyard party or barbecue or, temporarily as a way for you to experiment with different placement of lights to establish the best garden lighting setup for your home and taste. The great thing about the idea were about to share with you is that it’s very versatile. It doesn’t cost very much money, it doesn’t take a whole lot of time to set up, and once you get the basic idea of the you can really let your imagination run wild with different variations of it.
The basics of what we’re going to do if this; we’re going to use small, bright, inexpensive LED lights (kind of similar to Christmas tree lights, but one at a time and much brighter), coupled with small, inexpensive lithium coin batteries like you might find in a watch, and put them into completely portable containers for you to place as outside lighting anywhere that suits you. They containers will talk about here are your standard mason jars use for canning fruits, but really almost anything will do. In fact, we’ll get into some creative ideas later as fodder for you to get your own imagination running.
Also, before I go any farther I think it’s only fair to say that I was not a genius enough to come up with this idea on my own. Instead, while I was looking for ideas on how to the outside lighting fixtures in my new garden, I stumbled upon this idea at a website called EvilMadScientists.com. This idea got me so excited about the possibilities that I had to run to the store to get some supplies to give it a shot right away. However, I did have the chance to peruse the website little bit and found some other brilliant ideas that look both useful as well is just a lot of fun. I get to go back and examine it in depth, but I am looking forward to doing that sometime soon.
Okay, so on to the materials. We’re going to need some small LED lights, some lithium-ion coin battery cells, some mason jars (or other containers) and a bit of tape. Specifically, you’ll want to look for CR2032 Lithium coin cells (3V) and some 10mm (for example) ultrabright white LEDs with a diffused lens that you can find at EvilMadScience.com (this will allow for a better spread of light). More than likely you’ll be able to find these items at a store such as a RadioShack as well, but you may be paying a little bit more.
The process from here is really quite simple. You’re going to use the tape to attach the LED directly to the battery (the longer lead on the LED goes to the “+” side of the lithium coin battery). And just doing this, you have your light. Of course, because we’re talking about outside lighting, we need to do something to protect what you have. And this is where the mason jars come into play.
All you need to do is now tape the battery to the inside of the mason jar lid. If you want you can bend the leads of the LED at 90° so that the light is pointing down towards the bottom of the jar. Screw the lid on to the jar and VOILA! A perfectly waterproof, perfectly portable, relatively bright outside light fixture that you can place just about anywhere you want.
Do you want to see what it would be like to have lights coming up from beneath your flowers? Give it a try. How bout lining the sidewalk to your house? Easy enough to try that. Maybe you just feel like having fun for your next outdoor get-together so you tie a few of these charges so that they hang from the trees… you get the idea; you can do pretty much whatever you want with these. In fact, as mentioned above, some more creative ideas I’ve heard of include placing the lights inside of things such as Tupperware and then letting them float about in a pool. Someone else inserted these small little lights (obviously without the Mason jar) into a latex balloon filled with helium and created some bright floating colored lights for a birthday party.
Where the additional beauties of this setup, in addition to the ease and the value of putting it together (not to mention fun), is the fact that LED lights draws so little energy that even if not turned off, these little glow lights will stay lit for days on end. In fact, they be as long as 7 to 10 days. Obviously if you take the time to undertake the leads from the battery so that it turns off, you can have them ready for your next get-together much more quickly.
Another idea that I heard and I look forward to trying it involves using these little outside light fixtures to create beautiful, and safe, lumenarias for the holidays. For those of you who aren’t aware of what a luminaria is, they really can be quite beautiful. When I was a child we used brown paper lunch sacks with sand at the bottom and place small tea light candles inside of them to line a walk way or a wall during the holidays. Now having a burning candle inside the paper sack doesn’t sound all that safe to me (and it really didn’t even when I was a little kid…). But with this new approach, it’ll be quick, easy and SAFE to create dozens of these orange glowing paper sacks come holiday time. I’m really looking forward to it. Hopefully this, or some other application of these portable outside lights will be of some use to you too.