Every light we sell is an all-in-one unit: panel, battery, LED array and controller in a single sealed body. No groundwork, no cable runs, no meter. This page explains what is actually inside them, and what we are testing next.
LiFePO4 batteries
Lithium iron phosphate, not the lithium-ion you get in a phone. It matters for outdoor lighting in Britain for three reasons. It holds a usable charge in the cold, down to around -10°C where standard lithium-ion falls away. It tolerates being part-charged for weeks at a time, which is what a British winter does to a solar panel. And it does not fail dangerously — LiFePO4 is the chemistry used in grid storage precisely because it does not go into thermal runaway.
The practical result is the number we quote on the product pages: three to five days of running with no meaningful sun.
Monocrystalline panels
Higher efficiency per square centimetre than polycrystalline, which is what lets an all-in-one unit charge itself from a panel small enough to sit on top of the light. On the larger units the panel tilts separately from the head, so you can angle it at the sun even when the pole position is fixed by where the wall or the gatepost happens to be.
PIR motion sensing and dimming
A light running flat out all night wastes the charge it will need in February. Ours hold a lower output through the quiet hours and lift to full brightness when the sensor picks up movement, then drop back. On a driveway that means the light is genuinely bright at the moment somebody walks up it, rather than uniformly dim all night because the battery is being rationed.
Dusk-to-dawn control
No timer to set and no clock to reset twice a year. The controller reads the panel's own output to decide when the light goes on and off, so it tracks the actual seasons rather than a schedule somebody guessed at in June.
Ingress protection
Our lights are IP65 rated: sealed against dust, and against water jets from any direction. That is the rating that matters for a fixed outdoor light in UK weather. We quote IP65 because that is what the units are certified to — we would rather state the real number than a bigger one.
Die-cast aluminium bodies
On the project-grade units the housing is die-cast aluminium rather than ABS. It costs more and weighs more, and it is the right choice on a public pole where the light needs to survive a decade of weather and the occasional impact.
What we are testing next
We are actively looking at remote monitoring — the ability for a site manager or a parish council to see battery state and fault status across a whole run of lights without sending anyone out to look at them. For a council with forty lights across a village, that is the difference between planned maintenance and waiting for a complaint.
If you are specifying lighting for a site and there is something you need that we do not currently list, tell us. A good share of what we stock came from a customer asking for it first.