Honest Comparison

Solar or wired garden lighting, which is right for a Cyprus garden

Both are good technology. The right answer depends on whether your garden is already built.

For a finished garden in Cyprus, solar is usually the better choice, because it needs no trench, no electrician and nothing on the meter. Wired lighting still makes sense in a new build where conduits go in before the paving, or where a single point must produce far more light than any battery can hold.

What the choice actually costs

The lamp is rarely the expensive part of wired garden lighting. The trench is. Cable routes have to cross paving, lawn and planting, and in a finished garden all three must be opened and repaired. Solar removes that line from the quote entirely, each lamp is placed on a small footing and is finished the same day.

Running cost divides the same way. A wired garden circuit meters every hour of every night. A solar lamp charges from its own panel, in a climate that delivers around 3,300 hours of sun a year, and costs nothing to run from the day it is installed.

Where wired still wins

Wired fittings can push more light from one point than any battery driven lamp, so a floodlit sports court or a facade wash is still mains territory. A new build that plans its conduits early also removes solar's main advantage, because the trench costs nothing when the ground is already open.

The honest split we quote by: existing garden, solar. New build with the ground open, either. A single point needing thousands of lumens all night, wired.

The honest limits

Solar lamps depend on their panel seeing real sun. A plot in constant deep shade is a poor solar site, and we say so on site visits rather than after the sale.

In midwinter the charge window is shorter. Our lamps hold roughly three nights of reserve, which covers normal Cyprus cloud, but a week of storms will dim any solar lamp before it dims a wired one.

If your garden is the finished kind, the lamp most people start with is the 2200 lumen garden post, or you can ask us for a free lighting plan. Garden Post 2200 lm

The next questions

For paths, driveways, terraces and trees, yes. Our range runs from 280 to 3000 lumens, and 3000 lumens on a 3 to 4 metre pole is genuine street lighting. What solar does not do is floodlight a tennis court all night from one point.

Cheap ones fail three ways: panels too small to fill the battery, batteries that cannot be replaced, and plastic housings that crack in UV. Those are product problems, not solar problems. Sealed metal housings, replaceable batteries and properly sized panels remove all three.

Every normal night. The battery holds around three nights of charge, so one overcast day does not switch anything off. Only an unusually long stretch of heavy cloud runs the reserve down.