Best Outdoor Lighting for 2024

There is a lot of hands-on evaluation that goes into this product category. One of the main reasons for that is the lights themselves. It is difficult, if not impossible, to use the specs or photos of a product to get an idea of ​​how durable you can expect the lights to be. Sometimes you get lucky with an “unbreakable” notation in the description, but not always.

Another aspect of the light to consider is the physical connection. Some of these come pre-installed and you can’t replace them yourself. Some come pre-installed and can be removed. Most lights, in my experience, come packaged separately so you can install them yourself. Most of the time, this isn’t a problem. Sometimes, because these products all try to have a watertight seal, the lights can be difficult to install. A few times I found myself gripping and twisting the small lights so hard that I was afraid they would break in my hands. That didn’t happen, but it might be worth having a pair of gloves handy if you find yourself in the same situation.

In general, the main concern with most bulbs is how much light they give off. In the past, we’ve used an integrating sphere for some of our standard tests of light bulbs. That type of equipment can give you a lot of information about a light source, including lumens, color rendering index, and more. Read more about our light bulb test lab.

For this category I was specifically interested in brightness. Unfortunately, these strings of lights cannot be tested in our integrating sphere, but with some clever mathematical wizardry I changed the calculations we needed from a sphere to a linear path and came up with a workable solution. Using a standard digital light meterI was able to estimate the light output of each bulb in lumens.

If you look at the chart above, you can see the brightness of an individual bulb in each string, as well as the total brightness of the entire string of the solar and battery options. The Real Living lights were dim. Hampton Bay has the brightest individual bulb, while Coleman says the brightest string in this series is generally due to a higher bulb count.

In the AC powered options below, Brightech has the brightest individual bulb at around 196 lumens. Multiply that by 15 bulbs and you’re getting close to 3,000 lumens. Magitec takes the brightest overall win with 30 bulbs at 165 lumens, for a total of almost 5,000 lumens. To be fair, Magitec is offering two strands for the price of one, so one individual strand would be around 2,500 lumens; about 500 less than a single Brightech strand.