Bring Your Solar Powered Lamps Back to Life

Everybody has a bunch of these at home. You see them in the store, buy them, put them in your yard and depending on their quality you will be throwing them a way a few weeks to a season later.

Solar powered lamps work like this;

1. Sun shines on the solar panel. The battery gets charged.
2. Once it gets dark a photoresistor tells the LED to light up and the battery starts to discharge.

The main problem with solar powered lamps is the battery. When the lamp is brand new and the battery is fully charged it will work really well. But usually the solar panel is not enough to charge the battery fully so it will slowly get drained. A battery that is discharged loses its capacity and eventually the battery goes dead.

In this instructable I will show you how simple it is to replace the dead battery with a fresh one.

Many people don't realize how easy it is to actually do so. I am one of those who threw away solar powered lamps for more than 500$. It was just recently, when I started to work with electronics, that I decided to open one up to see if there was some component I could replace and bring it back to life. Turns out it was much easier than I thought.

Step 1: Stuff You Need

For this project you need the following;

- A broken solar powered lamp to fix
- A screwdriver
- A fresh rechargable NiCd battery
- 5 minutes to spare

Step 2: Dissembley

Start out with picking the lamp apart. Usually cheap electronics are easy to pick apart since it needs to be easy to put them together.

For this specific lamp I had to do the following;

1. Screw the body off with my hands.

2. Unscrew the four screws that kept the "control house" together

Step 3: Replace the Battery

Turns out that the battery is in a standard holder. Just remove it and replace it with the fresh one.

Step 4: Assembley and Test

Put everything together again by reversing the steps and see if it works.