Illuminated Issues
A moth to the Internet's shitty flame
In our old cabin we ran solar power and standard household electrical wiring. I created a system of plugs and a custom cable so that—depending on how they were configured—we could plug the entire cabin into our generator (like shore power for a boat or RV), or the generator could charge our solar battery, or we could just rely on only the solar. That solar battery was a stand-alone unit with a built-in inverter. Those devices are a lot more common now, but at the time we had to order it from China through a shady middleman and pick it up at the Oakland docks after it came off the boat. I realize this sounds like 1918, but it was 2018.
It was a lot of work running all that wire. Post-wildfire we didn’t aspire to similar effort for our little hut, A-frame, or outhouse, and the abundance of “simpler” solar+battery lighting solutions that beckoned from the Internet was alluring. Have you ever seen the Internet? It teems with temptation. Not only can you find a battery-powered lantern1, but there are fifty of them in fire engine red. Want a motion-activated light? We’ve got a thousand. Welcome to the Internet, we’ve got whozits and whatzits galore.
But here’s the thing… they’re all shit. I mean it. Everything is. Lights2. Bluetooth speakers. Dog beds. It’s all crap. The Internet opened wide this theoretical road of infinite-options and hyper-optimization, but paved it with junk.
There’s a reason Wirecutter came to reverence; someone needed to curate the mess. But even still, most of their winners—especially technology—is simply not built to last. We’ve moved to a disposable economy, which works well for keeping prices low, choices abundant, and a marketplace churning. Admittedly, it’s got some appeal, and I do my part (perhaps too much) to keep it humming.
But, what if I desire something that just works? That’s pretty critical for fixtures and infrastructure.
It’s hard to find. And it’s been my struggle as of late with cabin lighting. I guess pre-battery the approach would have been gas lanterns and candles? So maybe that’s the move. But like so many others, I fell to the temptation of the Internet’s abundance. How about solar-powered shed lights? We have millions.
I settled on one particular model for our recent builds. It had a small panel with a built-in battery and a warm LED bulb on a pull string. Simple. Exactly the low-effort set it and forget it type of solution we sought post-fire.
But… the panel sucks. The built-in battery sucks (I’ve had several of both fail and monied them and replaced them). The pull string and socket are questionable. To the bulb’s credit, it seems okay, so I bought a dozen of them before they were replaced with something shittier.
Today I’m working on replacing the panel and battery with a (theoretically) more robust modular kit. But it outputs the wrong voltage, so I need to solder a couple of in-line diodes to drop it, and if you actually understand what that means you know more than I do. Please help me.
I don’t want to be doing this. It’s not an exciting project for me. I just want some basic reliable lighting and one less thing to maintain. A lone bulb that illuminates when I tug a string seems pretty damn achievable given today’s technology. But I’ve found it impossible to wade through the Internet’s low-effort offerings to locate a trustworthy commercial-grade solution,3 so I’m stuck hotwiring this setup. I got sucked into the vortex and found the vortex impossibly vast, frustratingly lacking, and now onerously taxing. (I’m not alone. Molly is testing her tenth dog bed, I think. For the dog, not her, to be clear.)
This cyclical and ironic draw toward the simple solution that’s ultimately a poor fit and a maintenance time-suck is a trap to be reckoned with. Too often, from the comfort of my laptop I’m served a slew of enticing products that nearly fit my exact need. So I grab one. But it’s not quite right. Maybe this one is better. Or this one. They’re cheap, and it can be here by lunch, why not. But it breaks. They all break. So maybe I need to solder a diode or two into this other new one—whatever the fuck that means—and on and on it goes. It’s so close. So alluring. So surely-possible, yet inevitably wrong and perpetually failing, and it all stacks up hours of work that make life harder, not simpler, which was the only real goal from the get-go.
It’s immensely difficult to sift the Internet’s offerings to locate genuine quality. And harder still to just tune out the temptation of its wares and ignore the false promise that something perfect is out there, just over the horizon in the unending sea of sludge. Sometimes—maybe—the simple time-saving approach is to ignore the vortex altogether and just stick with the time-tested solution.
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Don’t get me started on LED bulbs. They’re all terrible. And yes, I’ve tried expensive high CRI bulbs. I finally gave up on LED bulbs in our house and switched over to rough service incandescent bulbs.
If well-made commercial grade products exist (for solar lighting or otherwise) they can be so hard to locate through the noise of so many cheaper variants. Have any industrial, commercial-grade products you like? Share em please.
HARD agree on everything expressed here. Also agree that all the LED bulbs are crap. I will try these rough service incandescent you speak of!
We are looking at building an off-grid cabin on our property, here in Northern Wisconsin. We ran into the same issues as you when wet built our shed, on the same property. I think we have settled on running traditional wiring in our future cabin build, and connecting that wiring to a battery generator/power station (like a Bluetti/Jackary/Anker, etc.). This way we can use traditional accessories in the cabin, and run them off a solar recharged battery backup, with a traditional generator as a further backup.