If you are a manufacturer of commercial solar lighting, this post will give you some valuable information on how to improve the reliability and intelligence of your solar offerings. And if you are a city, university, hospital or other organization with outdoor lighting requirements such as a parking lot or pathways, this post will tell you why you should be considering intelligent solar for your lighting needs.

Why solar?

Thanks to the increasing efficiency of LED lights, combined with dramatically improving solar panel and battery power, some solar area lights can now achieve 9,000+ lumens for a 50W floodlight fixture, comparable with wired lights. Not only is light output improving, but so also is run time, meaning that solar lighting is now a viable option for many roadway and area applications such as parking lots and recreational parks. Without the need for trenching, cabling, or grid power, solar lights can provide a great ROI for many locations.

Issues with solar

But unlike regular LED luminaires, solar lights are a complex system consisting of LED, solar panel, battery and charge controller. And because they have no means of communication, there is no way of telling remotely whether the light is working, and if it isn’t, what’s wrong with it. Here are some possible failure situations:

• Photocell is bad, or dirty
• Charge controller has failed
• Solar panel is not producing charge
• Battery is not holding charge

If a light fails the whole assembly must be taken down and opened up. This problem can be solved by replacing the dumb solar charge controller with a smart charge controller, and adding a cellular smart lamp controller with built-in cellular connectivity. By connecting the light to a cloud-based management and monitoring system such as Dhyan’s Ohli® lighting management system, you have complete visibility into the status of the light and all its components.

Dhyan’s intelligent solar solution

Dhyan’s solution provides you not just with the smartness to control the on/off and dimming of the light, but also the intelligence to understand exactly which component has failed if the light isn’t working. That way you can just replace one part, not the whole fixture. Dhyan’s smart solar charge controller and built-in, industrially rated cellular eSIM card connecting to Dhyan’s cloud-based StreetMan management system is the perfect way to add reliability and intelligence to your solar lighting offering.