There are all manner of intriguing new possibilities waiting to surprise and amuse anyone who might be toying with the idea of adding solar power to their garden shed. Not so long ago the humble wooden shed was seen as really no more than a handy store for garden furniture, toys and garden machinery and tools. But not any more.
No longer is the shed merely a garden store room for mowers and assorted other garden accessories; with extra space increasingly hard to find you would be mad to ignore the 100 or more square feet that even a modest 10 x 10 garden shed can give you. With that kind of additional space you could install a home office, setup a personal den, or even kit out a small gym.
It goes without saying however that none of this is going to amount to anything without electric power (for lighting and operating assorted devices). Your options are twofold: run out a power line or mount some solar panels on the roof.
The first option means you need to somehow run (and protect) a power line from an isolator switch added to the household mains supply. Far and away the easiest means of mitigating many of the problems inherent in doing this is to first convert the mains supply to low voltage, typically using a 12v transformer. Gardens in general and wooden sheds in particular don’t mix well with high voltage electricity.
The second route, involves little more than affixing one or more solar panels to the roof of the shed and attaching them to a storage battery. The number and size of the panels and batteries depends on how much power you want and the amount of time you want it. You then wire up low energy lights (typically LED lighting) to the batteries and there you have it: solar shed lights.
For those who would like the ultimate in ease of installation there are many all inclusive kits that provide all the bits and pieces and can be deployed with the greatest of ease. If you look at many brand new sheds these days you will often find that suppliers offer them with a solar lighting kit pre-fitted to cater for their growing popularity.
But why stop at solar lighting out in your shed? Solar powered CCTV can offer protection to parts of your property that would otherwise be difficult to cover. Solar CCTV systems consume little power and use wireless connectivity to transmit images to a number of possible destinations: web space, local hard drive, email and phone.
Being wireless means that by the time an intruder has clocked the a solar CCTV camera’s presence, it has clocked theirs and already sent the pictures, so they would be well advised at this point to back away and depart your property.
If you are interested in finding out more then this great article looks at in much greater detail.