Branch Solar Light for Your Tree, Bush or Wine

my grandma have a nice backyard with a huge vine which branches grow horizontally and serve as a roof which in hot summer days offer nice shade

for a few years, we had a sollar Light with 10m LED chain on it which looks very nice at the night but unfortunately over those years water finds the way into a few LEDs and I was repairing it almost every year, it was just a bad design which wasn't meant to last two years and with my help it worked whole six years but rubber on wires is now cracking and everything is falling apart so I decide to change whole LED strip and the result was awesome

so if you want to light up wine, tree or some project feel free to follow my steps

Supplies

1. solar light with the bigger solar panel link

or you can buy small solar light and change solar panel and the battery, replaced solar panel must have the same number of individual solar cells inside panel as your original solar light (usually 4 for 2V output), the battery should be around 2 000mAh

2. LED string usually called rice light link (it is waterproof)

3. soldering iron, solder wire, snips, heat-shrink tube.... (if you plan to cut and solder lights into branches)

4. power bank if you want to easily test LED strings in action

Step 1:

because I do not like throwing working parts away I decide to use 6 years old solar light which surprisingly still works so I replaced only old damaged LED string with new even smaller and completely waterproof LED string

in my case, I used 30m green string (300 LEDs) but I will probably add more in the future to make all branches glow even on every branch spreading point but I will probably need more sollar lights to handle all night lightening 300 LEDs looks like maximum limit for the light which I used

Step 2:

first I peel off the protective isolation to make access to add more strings

and I also added a connector for switching between power from USB or solar light

while I was working on ti LED string was powered from power bank to make sure if everything works after I connected more strings together.

Step 3:

I picked longest branches spreading out from the trunk and start attaching a string to the branches using wire or twisting LED string around the branch also hot glue could work werry well to attach LEDs close to branch (it looks better at the night and it's also harder to spot on daylight)

when you want to spread strings on the spot where is branch splitting you have two options:

1. you can just buy more string lights and attach them on branches without soldering or cutting

2. or cut strings and connect them together (under every LED is polarity indicator)

if you decide to use the second way just connect wires with an arrow pointing in one wire together (all LEDs are in parallel connection)

tip: is better to pick one wire (+) or (-) cut it connect all wires of the same polarity together and use hot glue heat shrink to make a waterproof seal and only after that cut and connect wires of other polarity together