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Solar garage lighting


Mr Punter

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I have a garage with no electrics and I am looking for a recommendation for solar lighting.  I am having the roof replaced with twin wall metal.  The garage is to be used for tools etc, so I don't need the lights to work for more than, say 30 mins, but I want them to be very bright to properly illuminate the space.  PIR would be nice (but not essential) so I don't leave them on by accident.

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Two thoughts - Given your locale I might go and look at boat equipment with some brighter LEDS assiking you are going for a low voltage (24V ish) then they will have complete systems. On the other hand you could install a mains based system that steps down to cage a battery and is then inverted back up from the battery to run some 240V stuff. 

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I found that an off-the-shelf solution didn't seem available.  I built our solar powered outside lighting, using two different battery systems, and two different types of lights, but with the same eBay PIR switches.

 

They are shown working in this post:

 

I can't see a problem with scaling up the same concept with a larger solar panel and battery and some LED strip lights.  I've been really impressed with the bright 12 V LED strips (they are the ones I fitted into the drip groove on the stacking cill over our front door), and reckon they would work well in a garage (they were what I was originally going to use before I discovered modular, plug together, LED tubular lights).

 

30 minutes of lighting isn't a problem for a modest sized battery and PV panel, it's just finding an off-the-shelf system that will be the challenge.

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