Do you live somewhere the sun shines all day year round? We've had bad luck with multiple brands of solar lights. They rarely work at all in the winter because it's dreary and snowy and in areas that are mostly shaded they can't charge up enough to stay on all night. Some will flicker on and off at times, some will be dimmer than others, etc. They just aren't super reliable as far as consistent lighting goes. We just built a new house last year and plan to do low voltage LED lighting.

Yea i can understand that, I wonder if they are getting any better making these lights more durable. I have heard similar complaints as well. There must be decent ones out there however it's probable that it's just a saturated market with cheap Chinese products possibly?

We tried them as well and found that they just didn't get enough charge to create enough light. If you think about it, at ground level, where we put them, there are a lot of things that shade them - the house, trees, even small shrubs and plants will do it. We have solar panels on our roof with no problem, but the solar lights to light the driveway were a big fail.

I've seen some reviews where you can get a light and the solar panel is a separate unit, so I suppose you could mount the light in an shady area and then mount the solar panel on or near the roof. I'll try and find the one I found earlier. Might be worth a look.

Ross - that sounds like a lot of wiring :-). If you want lights for right by the house I could see that working well. We need them along a long driveway, so the appeal was avoiding the need for a lot of wiring, which we're back to with solar panels mounded on the roof. We just gave up and have an unlit driveway at our current house, and will likely just have to trench for wiring for lights at the house we're current building.

You must have a really long driveway, I can probably light mine up with a light from the side of the house.

We have some of the kind you stick in the ground, generally they have worked fine and reliably in sunny California. But they are not built to withstand basketball or soccer ball strikes.

We also have used cheapo stick-on solar step lights those lasted about 2 years.

Good luck!

Tried them. Hated them. Better luck with hard wired.

Came to this site hoping someone found decent quality solar garden lights. My experience has been that they are junk and a waste of money with fails right out of the box, more fails within a month and all fail not much after that. I guess low wattage hardwired is only way to have reliable lighting. You'd think by now, solar would be more reliable and better quality but I guess, people keep buying and replacing them so why would mfr improve the quality. Very frustrating.

Yes, many of these lights from the big box stores and on-line sources are very cheap, and unlikely to retain a charge after one season's exposure. I'd look for wired low voltage fixtures which have an almost infinite life span, have a very wide range of fixture types and a very long energy saving working lifetime. The systems are 12-volt, with fixtures typcially using 3-watt lamps, giving the equivalent of 35 watts on a line voltage system.

We really like these lights. https://www.amazon.com/Moonrays-91754-Richmond-Rubbed-Bronze/dp/B004IEBBIY

We've had some of ours for 4 years, and now have 12. The only problem is that after about 3 years some of the paint has started to wear off. They are very bright and normally last all night for us.