Manor House Solar LED Marker Lights - Set of 4 Outdoor Pathway, Garden, and Driveway Lighting

Skip my Review and jump to the bottom for the 2016 UPDATE. This is NOT the product I reviewed in good faith. It has been completely redesigned. I gave it 5 stars for 2015. I currently give it 1 star because I have no knowledge of it and refuse to be party to a distortion on the part of NII Northern International, INC, the AMZN retailer selling it, and AMZN itself, for using reviews on an entirely differently engineered product.2015 ReviewTime is up. I have had a set of these since April (3 sets total now), and I'm declaring them a great design and sharp lights to mark your dock, driveway, or property.Pro 1These aren't waterproof. It clearly says water-resistant on the box. They are the only picture-on-the-box marker at Amazon that clearly has a notch hole under the light. Then when you first get them, you can flip them over and see that the notch runs to 2 channels and into the chamber where the LEDs are. Are they nuts? NO.The problem with solar pathway lights etc starts when the water and moisture can't get back OUT. I have been following the markers for sale and just about all of the supposed "waterproof" and otherwise ones, have high failure rates. The important part of the design of these is the small black box which holds the battery and solar panel. When you put in the battery and screw it down (with the right screwdriver and paying attention) that area of the unit IS watertight enough to fend off failures.The water or moisture getting into the chamber with the LEDs is a non-issue, because the LEDs are covered with silicon or something. It's called "potted". The water can't get to them. Then when the weather clears and the sun comes out, any moisture/water which got in, evacuates. These things get over 100*F on sunny days. This is also how most solar pathway lights have been designed for years. They put a hole in the bottom of the light cover. It's too expensive to put in different materials which have the exact same expansion coefficients. Then you have to have intense QC in production. It is done, but they are for commercial apps, and cost about $45 a piece to build and make a profit.Pro 2 - It's a nice-to-have, but these are designed and quality overseen by a real lighting company with their rep at stake. "Manor House" is one of about a dozen trademarks under which Northern International Inc. in Vancouver does business. They are relatively small, but make a cool marker and LED candles..Pro 3- I'm estimating, but the LEDs are in the 4500K-5000K color temperature arena . That means white, as in pure white. Sharp and crisp for outdoors. Not the pleasantly yellowish 3500K range, which is soft and a warm pleasure for the inside of your home. And not that blue/purple tinted florescent-light-gone-bad 6500K.. FWIW, that idiot obsession with blue tinted light started 10+ years ago. BMW put HID projector headlights in their cars. To the BMW driver, he/she saw a stronger more white headlight-field. But to an oncoming driver, over in the other lane, they were just offline enough to see a bluish tint in the light. That wasn't the headlight, it was a refraction/reflection artifact from the side of the lense of the projector. But a zillion kids wanted their first car to have BMW-like lights. So the demand for bluish lights ratcheted up, and bulb companies started making blue and bluish lights. Somehow it bled into the general culture. My neighbor has all three tones.. warm, white, and blue in the LEDs around his property. It looks really bad. I prefer just the 21st Century circa 4500K-5000K pure white. But that's me.Pro-4 I like the NiMh batteries. The NiCDs are old news and I'm not sure about the newish lithium LiPO4 (sp?) batteries yet. The AA 1.2v Nimh batteries can be bought with 2000+mAh (capacity). I think 900 mAh were included. They are OK and you're not going to get twice the capacity with 2000 mAh. But I swapped up..1) It does get them through the entire night after a sunny day. 2) The new NiMhs can recharge as many as 2000 times, and still have 70% of their capacity after 5 years.Con 1 - I bought sets as gifts after neighbors commented on the lights coming off of our new patio. (No fencerails yet, so I thought I'd out some lights on the edge.). And I watched the same thing happen twice and almost a 3rd time. The phillips head screwdriver you keep in the back of the junk drawer in the kitchen is the wrong size. And if you screw-up the screwing back in, the light will be dead in no time.Probably after the first rain. It's should be a phillips head #1. It'll have a 1, PH1 or PH01 on it. The screws are stainless steel (smart) but the screw holes can get out of whack or spring the plastic cover. That cover has to seat perfectly. It's not difficult, but closes/tightens up that box with the solar panel..Water/moisture gets in there, and its lights out.Tips. And some of them may be pure superstition, because I've done them since Day One and have had zero failure over the seasons of Spring and Summer.-For a buck.50 extra, I upped the battery 2000 mAh. Even on a half sunny day, they go all night.-For general air moisture, I put some dielectric grease on both ends of the batteries, before I put them in. You can buy a tiny tube for $3 and do 100 markers. It keeps the battery leads better conductive, and wards off moisture and water.-Since you have the PH01 (not a #4 or 5 and looking like you're a guy opening clams to make it work), enhance your probabilities even further. Put the back cover on the same way the mechanic puts on your wheels to make sure they are evenly torqued. Put in one screw and lightly snug it down. Skip the next hole, and put the next screw in the following hole. etc etc. Then when everything is in, go around in the same skipping order, and give them the final snug down. This is where I think the giftees messed up. They had trouble getting the next screw in, after they cranked down the first one. It tended to "spring" the casing lid so the hole alignment was dicey. Anyway...for the 4 of the 12 which failed on them, every one didn't have that back lid set. And one person just said @#$, and didn't put all of the screws in. They have all returned to service once that was straightened out.- Glue the final bottom cover on the bottom. Just bead it around the perimeter and make sure there are no gaps. Use something gooey, so the bottom cover will still be able to be removed and reapplied. I would say a nice RTV clear silicone. Except for one thing. RTV and other similar goopy rubbery sealers have curing solvents in them. They are known for creating an acid condition that is destructive to components and the circuitboards in computers. The 3 LEDs at each end are mounted and series-ed on a small piece of circuit board. JINC, I spent a few extra bucks for the silicone known as a non-corrosive to computer components. And didn't fill in the water-exit notch.OK, here comes the bigee. This is a result of intense study of Quantum Particle Physics, The Standard Model, and High Frequency Trading algorithms. You just can't get this anyoldwhere.Few things in life are absolutes, it is almost always an issue of probabilities.So,...Let's assume, no matter how crafty the design, no matter how careful we are.... it is probably not a good idea to expose the marker to prolonged driveway streams of rain, nor keep it immersed in a puddle for protracted periods of time.Whether a vertical or horizontal installation,... elevate the marker from the mounting surface. Use anything. I had some washers which were from some prior lifetime. They were about 1/2 inch thick and I glued them to the bottom. Our new patio is 20x20ft and graded for the water to run off. During summer storms, that put the lights under a heavy cascade of water pressure. Now 90% of it just flows underneath.IMHO, The price has steadily grown to just under $50, and I don't know if that is a great value. These lights are an odd widget, yet they do the job they are supposed to do, very well.Handled with a bit of care, Highly Recommended.***************UPDATE2016**********************UPDATE2016**********************UPDATE2016*********************This 2016 product is completely different than the 2015 product. My painfully meticulous and time consuming 2015 recommendation does not apply to the product being sold here. It uses an entirely different power transfer box and only one 900mah battery as the end power supply. That is half the available daily storage capacity of the 2015 product. My review is to be ignored. The product could be substantially better, the same, or substantially worse than all of the Customer product reviews for the 2015 design.I sincerely apologize to any AMZN customers who have purchased this product as a result of my review. I have no control over AMZN policies at their institutional level, but I can refuse to be an unwilling party to having my review shuffled to recommend a product I have never owned.My 5 star goes to 1 star until I have reason to change it.Two out of eight of my units failed after three months. Otherwise these are great.You can fix the failure. As long as it was the same as mine of course.Failure:In both of my failed units: Three of the LEDs shorted out and no longer worked. Removing the three LEDs allowed the other side to work. I was surprised that the LEDs failed, but both of these has some moisture trapped between the LED board and the lens. The good news is you can fix it for just a few bucks, as long as you also can solder.Repair Instructions:-Remove the battery door and battery.-Pry the plastic housing out of the back.-There should be two sets of wires, and a solar panel soldered to a small circuit board, which is screwed to the battery housing.-De-solder the red LED wires-Re-install the battery, and ensure the solar panel is face down.-Touch the one of the red wires to the "LED+" pad. This will let you determine if only one side failed.-If both sides appear to have failed, you can try touching a LED between the "LED+" and "LED-" contacts, if the LED lights up, then all the LEDs have failed.-Desolder the failed board from the main board.-Push the lens away from the housing by pushing on the inside, it should just slide out with some effort.-Use a small flat head screwdriver to pry the LED board out from the inside of the lens. The silicone should come with it.-Use a exacto knife to start removing the silicone at one edge of the board.-Then using needle nose pliers, roll the silicone back to remove it from the LED board.-Go ahead and rip off the old wires, there should be another set of wire pad you can solder to later.-De-solder each of the old LEDs.-Replace the old LEDs with Cree Part number: C535A-WJN-CU0W0231, these can be ordered from Digikey or Mouser. Follow the orientation of the flat printed on the white side of the LED board.-Solder the wires onto the other set of pads. Red goes to the side marked "+", the black on the side marked "-"-Test the fixed board by touching the wires to the LED+ and LED- pads.-If it works, put it back in the lens, and seal it up with silicone. Repeat for the other side if needed.-Re-install the lens.-Re-solder the LED board wires to the main board-Re-assemble the rest of the housing.The solar light uses a 5252F LED driver chip, which you can look up, the actual circuit inside is pretty simple.These boundary lights have been on my driveway for over 5-years and I have never had to replace a battery the whole time. They light up at night and provide a great reference when backing out of the driveway. I would order more if they were still in stock.Two of the four I bought work extremely well and I would give them five stars. First, just like other reviews said, I placed different batteries (better one) before installing. They all get the same amount of sunlight and therefore should get the same amount of charge time. Well they don't stay lit the same, despite having the same batteries and sun time. I placed these on garden paver for a nice flat clean look. They installed very easy and I only used different hardware (Tapcon) since it was being mounted to a concrete service. Within the first few nights two of them were out many hours before the others. I thought maybe the batteries were not fully charged originally and I replaced all four with new Duracell rechargeable 2500mAh. The same two are still going out 2-3 hours before the others do. This leads me to believe that all units are not made exactly the same. They are very bright and look good when they are on and just wish they were a little more uniform with hours of use. So far, they have been out in hard rain and have had no issues with weather.Overall, they seem well made and I only have the one problem that I described above. Don't get wrong, it's not like the two go out in an hour or two, just not as long as the others. Would have rated these 5 stars if they all lasted as long, or close to it.