Rechargeable Lamps

Rechargeable lamps put light where there is no socket: on a table, a balcony, a shelf or a terrace. But the convenience depends on far more than a fashionable shape. What counts is brightness at a realistic runtime, how it charges, how stable the base is, its IP rating and whether the battery can be replaced. Here is how to choose a cordless lamp that will not go dark halfway through the evening.

A summer evening has one flaw: it ends. When dusk falls after nine, the patio turns into a dark stage with no actors, and the balcony into a concrete niche nobody steps out onto any more. Yet it is precisely after dark, when the heat lets go, that sitting outside is at its loveliest. The difference between a terrace you flee back indoors from and one where conversations run past midnight usually comes down to two or three points of warm light. In this post we show how to build patio and balcony lighting out of ready-made blocks – string lights, rechargeable lamps, glowing spheres and solar lanterns – with no renovation or chiselling, and quite often without a socket.

A lamp you put down exactly where it’s needed – on the patio table, by the bathtub, on the windowsill – with no hunting for a socket and no extension lead tangling underfoot. It sounds like the obvious choice, until it turns out that after two seasons the battery holds half of what it did at the start and the lamp glows dimmer than a child’s night light. In this guide we compare rechargeable lamps with corded ones honestly: what you really gain, what you give up, how long the battery lives and in which places around the home (and beyond) a cordless lamp is unbeatable.