You can buy the battery operated candles at Bed,Bath & Beyond, A.C. Moore's, Michael's, Plow & Hearth and they are wonderful. That is all we use anymore in our house. We live in a Sr. Citizens community and about 3 yrs. ago there was a bad fire in a garden apt. one windy Jan. night started by a plastic coffee maker being put on a burner that was on by mistake. A man lost his death because he went back into his first floor apt. to get some important papers and the ceiling from the apt. on fire fell on him and killed him. They had to tear the entire building down and rebuild it. Every since then, we only use the battery operated ones. They have some that are scented and the outside feels like real wax. They have a lot of hours of use, something like 100 or 500 before you have to replace the batteries. They are LED lights. Candles that come in lots of colors plus white and off white.

Thanks everyone for the information, and Tommyc & Simon, I have saved your instructions for a future project. I have been using solar panels with AA batteries to power my LED projects and it seems to be working wonderfully. I really like not having to hard wire stuff. It took me a few tries before I clued into just how bright different LEDs are. The first ones I got were pathetic, and I ended up using some 'mid-range' LEDs. They produce enough light to satisfy the look I'm trying to achieve. Still working on diffusing them somewhat to produce the most pleasing glow, apparently a small amount of silicon over the LED will do that. I also learned that 'yellow' LEDs don't necessarily produce 'yellow' light, but more amber. And that 'yellow' LEDS are actually clear. All very confusing, but once you figure it out it's like having insider information! LOL Must try David's trick of the mylar. Is it clear mylar or silver? Thanks again all! Most helpful bunch here.

Thanks for the nice comments everyone. I don't think I have any good closeup shots of the birdhouse but I wish I'd taken some when it was new. It has a copper roof which was bright and shiney back then, and was a stained wood. Weather hasn't been kind to it though and a year ago I gave it a sloppy multi-colored paint job to brighten it up. It was home to many broods of bluebirds and tree swallows over the years (until the English house sparrows invaded. :-( Now it is boarded up and decorative only.) This has really been the year for nasturtiums it seems! I see them everywhere. Conditions must be just right for them this year. I call the birdhouse garden my orange garden. I joke that it is a racist garden - orange only. Each year I plant various flowers of pink and red and purple and the orange marigolds take over and crowd out and suffocate the flowers of other colors. So I've given up and plant only orange flowers out there now, since that is all that flourishes. They have their gated little community. No point in giving these bigotted plants pink or purple pot mates to abuse! Anyways they coexist well with my orange daylilies and they welcomed the orange nasturtiums! While I do appreciate the concerns about fire, there is a vast difference between arid Texas and Australia and rain soaked New England. This has been the rainiest summer in recorded history! I don't think there has been a forest fire here in decades, and those I remember in the dim past were quickly contained. Fenceposts sprout here, and we have so much rain that even with short growing seasons we have two cuttings of lush green hay each year. The "fire spirit" is interior house lighting reflected in the window glass that I shot the photo through. The perspective doesn't show it well, but the pine trees are probably 50 yards up the hill from my gardens. They are so moisture laden that branches cut from them smother the fire in our barbeque pit. I didn't show a closeup, but the candle holders in the back gardens are constructed of metal with glass windows and metal roofs. They are roomy so that there is quite a bit of air space between candle and windows. The lanterns are suspended from sturdy cast iron hooks. There is virtually no way that fire can escape these lanterns. The mason jar has a metal jar lid that the candle sits on (which creates an air space that prevents the glass bottom of the jar from heating.) I wouldn't use any tealights during a drought (if we ever experience a drought again!) or during high winds (although high winds here usually bring drenching rains.) If our neighbors' (and I use the term "neighbors" loosely!)fireworks landing in our pasture and woods haven't set fire to anything, it is unlikely that fire is in our future. But that's another story! If I lived in California instead of Vermont, I would probably hesitate to strike a match even inside the house and most definitely would give up the pleasures of roasting hotdogs on an outdoor fire surrounded by lanterns with real candles within. I am always in awe of how quickly a fire can spread in dry geographical areas with high winds when I see news coverage of wild fires/bush fires in our western states and in Australia. Fire seems an ever present threat there.

Light sources have a spectrum. In some cases it is narrow, and in others wider. The sun, for example, emits through the entire visual spectral band, as well as UV and IR. tungsten and tungsten halogen are hot emitters with various spectral bands generally characterized by their apparent color temperature. The sun's spectrum is close to that of a 6000K (degrees kelvin) black body, whereas tungsten lights may be 2700K and tungsten halogens up to 3300K. The latter color temperatures are considered lower than the sun color temperatures, but are called warmer. Arc lamps that are spectrally broad may fall into the same color temperature range as the sun, but depending on line structure from the gasses used and the pressure that they are running at, may appear redder or bluer than the sun. Note that as these thermal sources are turned down with a dimmer, they become redder (warmer color) even though they are getting colder, physically. Now, getting to light emitting diodes, there are two types that I'm aware of being used for illumination (excluding variants). One type emits mainly at a single color, but because they are not true laser sources, this color band may be somewhat wide. Combinations of these sources may be used to try to match the tristimulus diagram of human eye response and look like a black body emitter at some color temperature. High color temperatures are considered colder because they have more blue; lower temperatures are considered warmer because they have more red. Note that this is referring to color temperature, and not LED physical temperature. The Cree LR4s had a scheme for re-balancing the color temperature as the LEDs aged. As I recall they were available in two different color temperatures for different applications. A clothing store, for example, might want a higher (colder) color temperature for interior illumination, whereas a kitchen might prefer something warmer (lower color temperature). (No one should be embarrassed if confused by this contradictory nomenclature.) Cree provided me a (proprietary) spectral chart that showed that their color spectrum was broad, but not particularly close to matching a black body spectral diagram. To avoid any post construction complaints I bought a single lamp and tested it against my soapstone and granite to ensure that the green highlights in each were being properly illuminated to provide a pleasing color balance when illuminated with the warmer LR4 option. The second type of LED source uses a deep blue or UV LED (or array of LEDs) to illuminate a phosphor or a combination of phosphors intended to emit a particular "whitish" color temperature. These phosphors tend to look yellow when viewed with the lamp off. By choosing the phosphor chemistry, and possibly over coating with filters, different color temperature sources are created. The goal is to know what color temperature one wants before specifying the particular lights to be used. If you want a tungsten halogen color temperature, specify 3200K - 3300K. For regular tungsten, 2700K - 2800K is good. Higher values toward 4000K will be bluer and more blue sky matching. As an aside, LG was able to cut the cost of organic LED (OLED) TVs by using all white (phosphor) blue-emitting OLEDs with red/green*/blue filters rather than the more difficult to manufacture sets of red/green/blue single color LEDs. kas *maybe yellow, I'm to lazy to go look