Review on Enhance Your Outdoor Space With LEONLITE 6W Well Lights: Waterproof, Anti-Glare, Low Voltage Landscape LED Lights In Warm White - Pack Of 6 by Nick Nigerson

This review is for the LEONLITE 6W Well Lights Landscape LED, Anti Glare, their so-called "one-sided” lighting. I’m giving this item 4 stars, because while I like it very much, there are some issues to note.First, the good stuff: the main light is built very well. The aluminum dome has a nice heft to it, and it fits into a plastic enclosure very securely, with not one but two O-rings to ensure a snug and waterproof fit. There are 18 LEDs in two rows and they are quite bright. Waterproof wire nuts are included.So what’s not to like? In brief, these lights are too bright. Even though the lights are indirect when viewed from above or approached from the side, if you have a placement where the lights can be viewed head-on, they are in fact rather blinding. I’ve installed five of these lights along my driveway, which is a problematic location, because the driveway has no edging: it abuts a sloping lawn, and on the other side the elevation drops away to my neighbor’s yard. What that means is that my neighbor has to look at these extremely bright lights whenever they are on; only pedestrians or cars that park in the driveway are likely to be standing where the lights are truly shielded.I also have some concerns about quality control. In order to see if there might be any way to dim these lights, I opened them up. (I should insert here that in my testing, the lights do seem to respond to a DC dimmer, but it was an indoor dimmer that could not be buried outside, next to my driveway.) I was puzzled to find that the five screws that hold the light assembly together were randomly tightened: some were almost loose while others were severely tight. Inside, the assembly was admirably simple: the LED board was screwed to an aluminum heatsink/bracket, while the control board was in the other half, completely immersed in something like silicone caulk. That would seem to totally protect the control board from moisture — except that, of the six lights, only two had control boards wholly covered by the silicone. The other four had various bits of the board — edges or chips — exposed above the silicone, despite the fact that the housing has slots that ought to hold the board in a standard position. To be sure, there’s a substantial silicone gasket between the two parts of the housing, and I doubt it would be easy for moisture to enter. But if a control board fails, I’d wager that the exposed boards are more likely to be shorter lived.There’s also a design issue. The lighting unit itself fits snugly into a plastic housing, which is described on ebay as "insulating wiring from soil and water.” Uh, only somewhat. The housing is far less robust than a genuine UL-listed outdoor plastic outlet box. There are three slotted knockouts, but even if you used waterproof fittings for a cable running in one side and out the other, the bottom knockout would surely admit water — or, in my experience here in California, ants. If this plastic receptacle were more robust, with threaded fittings for box connectors, it would be easier to use and might be genuinely waterproof (and ant-proof as well). But low-voltage wire is usually direct-bury, so the best thing this housing can do is physically protect the wires that exit the lighting unit. And that much it does.Okay, back to the brightness issue. I wasn’t willing to inflict bright spotlights on my neighbor, but I really love the low profile of these units. So when I saw that there was space between the LEDs and the translucent diffuser lens that might accommodate another piece of thin plastic to diminish the light transmission, that’s what I did — I slid some milk-white plastic from another fixture into that space, dimming the output by maybe 25%. The lights are much more tolerable now, and they still guide anyone walking up the driveway in the dark. Yeah, I know, I’m sure I’ve voided the warranty, but I’ve never found any other driveway light solution that came anywhere near this close to what I was looking for. So we’ll keep our fingers crossed!