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Nanoleaf Solar Garden Lights review: a fun way to light up your yard all night long

by admin June 24, 2025

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Nanoleaf Solar Garden Lights: two-minute review

TechRadar Smart Home Week

This article is part of TechRadar’s Smart Home Week 2025. From lighting and switches to robot vacuums and smart thermostats, we’re here to help you pick the right devices to make your life easier, and get the most out of them.

Nanoleaf specializes in energy-efficient LED smart lights, or the home, and now the garden too. Recently launched, these solar-powered outdoor lights are available in a two-pack for $49.99 / £49.99, or a six-pack for $139.99 / £139.99.

We tested the pack of two light clusters, which come in a long box along with two solar panels that can either be stuck in the ground or screwed to a fence with the brackets and screws provided (we tried both types of installation).

Alternatively, it’s possible to power the lights via a USB-C power socket on the solar panel if there isn’t enough power from the sun. I tested the Nanoleaf lights during an unusually sunny period in London, so I didn’t have to rely on an external power source – the sun’s rays were more than enough to keep the lights going all night.

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(Image credit: Chris Price)

Nanoleaf Solar Garden Lights at Nanoleaf for $49.99

Really, it’s best to think of each light as a bunch of eight flowers attached to a central stalk that sticks into the ground or a flowerpot. Two different sized tubes are provided depending on whether you want to have a long or a short stalk (we tried both).

What’s more, each of the flowers in the bunch can be adjusted to face whichever way you want, though they should be handled from the bottom closest to the stalk rather than the top of the stem next to the LED lightbulb.

Once the solar panels are installed where you want them, you can switch on the power using a button on the bottom underneath the actual panels and a green light will indicate you how much charge each of the lights has (four bars means it’s fully charged).

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(Image credit: Chris Price)(Image credit: Chris Price)(Image credit: Chris Price)

Using the bracket and screws provided, I installed one of the solar panels relatively high up on a south facing fence, angling the panel up to the sun, while the other was placed in the ground on a north facing fence. Needless to say, since I’m in the UK, the south-facing panel charged up much quicker, although both provided more than enough power for the LED lights to come on at night.

Of course, the real magic starts once it starts to get dark and the lights actually switch on to illuminate your garden – not until nearly 10pm in the summer in the UK, but much earlier in the winter.

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(Image credit: Chris Price)(Image credit: Chris Price)

Unlike other Nanoleaf products, such as the Matter Smart Multicoloured Rope Lights, which connect via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, these lights are actually refreshingly old school. So instead of using a mobile phone connected to the Nanonleaf app for control, you use a conventional remote control instead.

Powered by two AAA batteries (provided), this looks similar to an Amazon Firestick remote. At the top are buttons for switching the lights on and off, while underneath there are controls for changing the color of the lights.

Pressing RGB toggles the lights to the next solid color, with options for decreasing and increasing brightness (marked with sunshine icons) on either side. In addition, you can choose warmer or colder whites. These are marked with thermometer icons with either a sun or a snowflake.-

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(Image credit: Chris Price)(Image credit: Chris Price)

Underneath the lighting options are timer settings (four-hour, six-hour and eight-hour timers are provided) as well as an ambient light sensor which will turn the lights on or off automatically at sunset and sunrise.

There’s also the option of toggling between 11 animated scenes with the different bulbs lighting up in an array of colours, like a sort of less noisy firework display.

It’s all great fun and overall we were pleased with the lights and the way they performed. Using a standard remote rather than relying on Wi-Fi control via a mobile phone will obviously suit many, especially those who struggle to get a Wi-Fi signal outdoors. The range of the remote also seems quite good (around 33 feet / 10 meters) so it may be possible to control the lights from indoors if you have a small garden or yard.

(Image credit: Chris Price)

However, there are a couple of small niggles. One of the problems we found is that experimenting with the lighting settings was a little bit tricky, especially in the dark when we weren’t able to see the remote control very well to make changes.

Ironically, given you shouldn’t need a smartphone to control the lights, we found we had to use the torch option on the phone to light up the display on the remote control. Also, it took a bit of getting used to all of the different buttons and what they each of them did. Personally, I found the brightly-colored animated scenes a little over-the-top for everyday use though quite enjoyed the solid colours and warm/cool whites the lights could offer. However, it is largely a matter of individual taste.

Nanoleaf Solar Garden Lights: price and availability

$49.99 / £49.99 (two-pack)
$139.99 / £139.99 (six-pack)
Available direct from Nanoleaf

Available either in packs of two or six, the Nanoleaf Solar Garden Lights represent pretty good value for money (I had been expecting them to cost nearly twice as much). Each of the units has eight bulbs and they are quite well made (they also offer IP65 waterproofing). They are available direct from Nanoleaf in the US and the UK.

Particularly impressive are the solar panels which, rather usefully, tell you how much charge they have as well as providing back up power via USB-C charging. And while obviously the garden lights aren’t as high-tech or as sophisticated as some smarter lighting solutions, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Finally, they also offer much more bang for your bucks than many standard LED garden lights, which often don’t allow for any customization at all.

Nanoleaf Solar Garden Lights: specs

Swipe to scroll horizontally

Product name

Nanoleaf Solar Garden Lights

Price

From $49.99 / £49.99

Total assembled height

37.4 inches / 950mm

Length of each stem

17.3 inches / 439mm

Solar panel dimensions (W x H)

5.2 x 5 inches / 132 x 102.5mm

IP rating

IP65

Brightness

50 lumens

Color temperature range

2,850 – 3,150K

Color channel configuration

RGBW

Charging methods

Solar, USB-C

Solar charge time

6-10 hours

Control distance

30 feet / 10m

Should you buy the Nanoleaf Solar Garden Lights

Swipe to scroll horizontallyNanoleaf Solar Garden Lights score card

Attribute

Notes

Score

Value

Given all the elements that make up this two-pack, the flower-like Nanoleaf lights represent excellent value for money. In fact they’re not that much more expensive than two bunches of real flowers (much brighter too).

5/5

Design

Maybe it’s not for everyone, but I quite like the innovative design of the Nanoleaf lights. Particularly impressive are the stems which you can easily bend to the optimum position as well as the flexible mounting options for the solidly-built solar panels.

4.5/5

Performance

While many may prefer using a standard remote rather than a mobile phone app in the garden, it’s not always easy to make changes in the dark. That said, once up and running, the lights are impressive.

3.5/5

How I tested the Nanoleaf Solar Garden Lights

I used the Nanoleaf solar garden lights for a week
I experimented with all the lighting options
I used in various configurations with different lengths of ‘stalk’, and both wall- and ground-mounted solar panels

Testing solar garden lights isn’t the most sociable of activities. After all, you can only really make changes after dark, which means testing after around 10pm when approaching the longest day in the UK. Also, as noted earlier, it’s not easy to make changes when you can’t see the remote very well in the dark, which is why I also had to use a phone to provide light.

Will I continue to use these lights long after the review has been published? (That’s always the real test of any review.) Yes I think so although I will probably keep them on a single white light setting rather than having them cycle through various colored scenes which can be a little over the top.

As my son said when he first saw the bright colored lights coming on in the garden after a night out: ‘Why has our garden been transformed into Love Island?’

Nanoleaf Solar Garden Lights: Price Comparison

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June 24, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Gardyn Indoor Hydroponic Garden Review: Better Growing Through AI

by admin June 17, 2025

I’m in the midst of putting together a buying guide of indoor vertical gardening systems, and the Gardyn—the 30-plant Home 4.0, to be exact—was the first tester to arrive at my house. I had it unboxed and set up within a couple of hours, lights on and water pump running. I’m already a pro! I thought.

Sure enough, within a couple of weeks, all of Gardyn’s proprietary seed-filled yCubes had sprouted, and a couple of weeks after that, I was harvesting bowlfuls of herbs and salad greens. Even though from setup to harvest the Gardyn required the use of about five brain cells, I was quite pleased with myself, despite having long ago given up gardening outdoors due to deer, rabbits, and my own incompetence with anything other than starts from the big-box store.

What I failed to understand, but would come to grasp with subsequent systems, was that indoor hydroponic gardening is just as hard in some ways as outdoor gardening. I had no way of knowing this, however, because Gardyn’s pricey add-on app and AI gardening assistant, “Kelby,” had been doing all the real work via a network of sensors and live-view cameras (two on the larger Home model, one on the smaller Studio).

Easy Living

My new friend Kelby had been gathering data in order to set its own watering times, schedule its 60 LED lights, and send me the occasional customized task that never took longer than 10 minutes. And this customized maintenance isn’t just helpful for convenience, as mold, bacteria, or roots clogging up the plumbing are extremely common in hydroponic gardening. Kelby told me when to add the needed nutrients (included) and how much to add, when and how to attend to the plants’ roots, and even when to harvest.

Photograph: Kat Merck

There’s also remote monitoring, of course, and a vacation mode that keeps the plants in a sort of stasis. Most of the work on my end was simply me admiring my plants, and admire them I did. The first time I ever saw a Gardyn was a couple of years ago, in a Parade of Homes show house, adjacent to a floor-to-ceiling wine cabinet. “Wow, what is THAT?! I want one!” announced nearly every person who shuffled by in their paper booties. Even in a $2 million spec house, the lit-up display of lush herbs, flowers, and vegetables was a showstopper.

When I began testing other systems, I was feeling quite big for my britches. At this point, I had successfully grown sunflowers, lemon balm, and even an entire kohlrabi. I’ve got this! Within five minutes of opening the other systems’ boxes and finding pH test strips and vials, manual-dial timers, and multiple bags of supplements, however, I realized I did not have this. In fact, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Gardyn had only made me think I knew what I was doing. And, according to founder FX Rouxel (pronounced F-X, like the initials), that’s Gardyn’s entire raison d’être.

Engineered Growth

Courtesy of Kat Merck

You might expect the founder of a hydroponic gardening system to have an agricultural background (perhaps even a certain kind of agriculture), but Rouxel is a tech guy. Though he did once work for the French version of the Environmental Protection Agency, his most recent pre-Gardyn gig was at French IT company Capgemini, deploying cloud, automation, and AI technologies. Although he is also a parent, cook, and Ironman athlete, his passion lies in using technology to lower the entry barrier to growing your own food.

“With other systems, they’re basically a pump on a timer,” Rouxel told me during a recent interview. “You need to know what you’re doing. We looked at, ‘Can we use AI to actually solve this problem?’ Unlike our competitors, we have a big chunk of the company that is just engineers.” They make sure the Gardyn app is constantly adjusting through data collected via the system’s two cameras and sensors that track water usage, humidity, temperature, and plant growth. If the system identifies an issue, it will send the user a specific task through the app to fix it.

Note that I did find the cameras to be slightly glitchy during the seven weeks I’ve been using the Gardyn, requiring periodic resets of the system to keep them both online. It didn’t seem to affect any of my tasks or plant stats, but I found it irritating nonetheless. Though if I weren’t using the Kelby feature, it wouldn’t matter, as the cameras are essentially useless otherwise.

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June 17, 2025 0 comments

Fortnite player count stats across the game's history.

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Roblox game Grow a Garden suddenly shatters several all-time player count records

by admin June 1, 2025

The Roblox game Grow a Garden rapidly gained popularity over the months since its release, to the point where it shattered almost every player count record in the final week of May 2025.

It’s no secret that Roblox is a huge game, if it can even be called that at this point. It’s more of a platform for users to express themselves and create whatever game they want with a large suit of dev tools.

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However, Roblox is so immensely popular that one game has almost sextupled the concurrent player record for Counter-Strike 2, a game that consistently tops Steam’s 24 hour player count charts.

A relatively simple game called Grow a Garden has reached a record of 11,694,315 players at once, with that one simple title completely dwarfing every other title on the market. It’s not even close.

One Roblox game over 3 times more popular than Steam’s most played title

At the time of writing, PUB:G holds the all time player count record on Steam. Its heyday was legendary, everyone was playing this title when it came out in 2017. It practically birthed the Battle Royale fad that took over the entire games industry for years.

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Its record is 3,257,248 concurrent players. That’s not even one third of the record Grow a Garden just set. Fortnite’s all-time concurrent player record is over 14 million, so that game still clears Grow a Garden, but not by much.

Bear in mind, however, this is just one title on Roblox’s massive library. So, what exactly is Grow a Garden?

Roblox

It’s essentially a clicker game. You buy plants, wait for them to grow, sell them, and then repeat the process, buying bigger and better plants as you go. Plants grow offline, so players are incentivized to get their garden all set up and log back in each day to harvest.

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So, the reason this record was broken was due to an update being released that added some new content. Because of that, millions of players who had planted gardens all logged in at the same time, boosting that concurrent player count to unseen heights.

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This broke the following Roblox records according to the Guinness World Records wiki:

Most visits in 10 minutes – 8,276,432
Most visits in 1 hour – 26,711,096
Most visits gained in a day – 209,423,018
Most visits gained in a week – 1,087,479,963
Most concurrent players – 11,694,315

It’s hard to put into words just how massive Roblox is. The games industry has massive conferences like the Summer Game Fest that show off projects people put literal hundreds of millions of dollars into, and yet this Roblox game will likely have more concurrent players than anything announced.

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June 1, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Grow A Garden Is One Of The Most Popular Games On The Planet

by admin May 22, 2025

It’s likely that you’ve never played or even heard of Grow a Garden, a new user-created experience in Roblox. But millions of people have. In fact, the very simple farming sim at one point had over 5 million active players, beating out games like Counter-Strike 2 and Marvel Rivals on Steam. It’s likely Grow a Garden is one of the most played games on the planet right now. And it was developed by a teenager in a few days.

The Top 10 Most Played Games On Steam Deck: February 2024 Edition

On May 21, as highlighted in a new report by GameFile, Grow a Garden has become the most popular game on Roblox, which itself is a massive platform with millions of active users. As I write this on a Wednesday, Grow a Garden is hovering at around 1 million CCUs (Concurrent Users), making it easily the most popular game on Roblox. It would also outrank everything on Steam except Counter-Strike 2, according to SteamDB. But on May 17 (a Saturday), Grow a Garden had over 5 million active players, the first game to ever do so on Roblox. At that number, Grow a Garden would be nearly twice as popular as PUBG on its best day which, at a peak of just over 3.2 million, still holds the record on Steam.

So yeah, Grow a Garden is popular. The simple farming game was developed by a teenager according to Janzen Madsen, the owner of Splitting Point, a game studio which has taken over management of the game since it hit the big time. Madsen told GameFile that the unnamed creator still retains “like 50 percent of the game.”

Madsen told the outlet that the original creator made Grow a Garden in about three days. And it shows. Watching gameplay of it, the menus, visuals, and gameplay are very basic and look more like a prototype of something that will be finished later. But this is the game. And millions of people around the world are playing it everyday, growing crops and sharing videos of their adventures on TikTok.

While some might be surprised that something like Grow a Garden is reaching millions of players, the reality is that Roblox has become a massive platform. It recently, with the help of hit games like Grow a Garden, reached over 16 million active users. Games like Brookhaven, Dress to Impress, and Adopt Me are more likely to be the games kids are playing these days than GTA, Call of Duty, or even Minecraft.

Of course, anything that’s this popular and making this much money is bound to be filled with bad actors and scammers. And yes, there’s a very well-documented seedy underbelly of Roblox, with allegations that kids are being exploited by adults and evidence of some truly horrible shit happening in servers around the game. But so far, Grow a Garden seems to be a mostly wholesome piece of the Roblox ecosystem. It’s also a sign that we are entering a new era of video games, even if I’m not sure it’s a better one.

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May 22, 2025 0 comments