Lamp Post Technology Has Been Transformed By Sun Power

The tradition of using a lamp post for garden lighting is a relatively new one. In fact, if you think about it, garden lighting itself is a fairly new trend, largely because it owes its popularity to relatively recent 20th century landscapers and landscape architects. Very few early gardening books even mentioned garden lighting.

The earliest form of lighting used in gardens was probably lanterns that were used with gas or oil. They were either mounted on walls, gate piers or on wood or metal posts, or they were hung up temporarily. In some parts of the world, particularly in China and Japan, distinctive stone lanterns were used with little oil lamps.

The lamp post itself did not originate in our gardens. Rather, the earliest lamp posts were used for illuminating streets in towns and cities in various parts of the world during the 19th century. Simply a post erected to support some type of lamp or lantern, the earliest type of lamp post relied on gas and other similar fuels for power or energy. Towns and cities hired lamplighters whose job was to light the gas in the evening, and then extinguish it at first light, in the morning. They used long sticks with wicks to light the gas, and then a hook at the top of the stick to put the lights out. It was a laborious task.

From about the 1880s, electric lamps and lights replaced the old gas lights as man discovered how to exploit and use fossil fuels for power. As urban areas mushroomed, electricity seemed to be the most sensible option. It also soon became the power source of choice in most of our houses and gardens. But electricity isn't a renewable source of energy, and its production and use has become a serious threat to the environment. Solar energy, on the other hand, is a renewable source of energy and it doesn't harm or pollute the environment at all.

There's nothing new about solar energy, but the technology behind it is getting better and better. Take the solar lamp post as an example. Some of the earliest types relied on quite bulky solar collectors or panels that were mounted somewhere in bright sunlight, where they could draw energy from the sun's powerful ultra-violet rays. This meant that conduits had to be buried underground so that wiring could be run from the collector to the lamp post itself. That wasn't very different to the installation of electrically generated lamp posts.

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Today's solar lamp post incorporate the energy collection and storage system within the unit itself. So in effect, the lamp is a stand-alone light source. This also means that if for any reason the light goes out, it won't affect any of the other solar lamps in the garden. Better still, solar lamps are easy to install and cheap to run. The energy from the sun is free, and all you'll have to do is replace their LED bulbs and batteries from time to time. And that shouldn't be very often. There's no doubt that we've come a long way in little more than 100 years. More on outdoor solar lights