There are many hands-on evaluations available in this product category. One of the main reasons for this is the bulbs themselves. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to use a product’s specs or photos to get a feel for how durable you can expect the bulbs to be. Sometimes you get lucky with a “non-destructive” notation in the description, but not always.

Another aspect of the bulb to consider is the physical connection. Some of them are already pre-installed and you cannot replace them yourself. Some are preinstalled and can be removed. Most bulbs, in my experience, come packaged separately so you can install them yourself. Usually, that’s not a problem. Sometimes, because these products try to have a waterproof seal, the bulbs can be difficult to install. A few times I found myself holding and twirling the little bulbs enough to worry that they might break in my hands. Nothing works, but it might be useful to have a pair of gloves if you find yourself in a similar situation.

In general, the main concern of most lights is the amount of light they put out. In the past, for some of our routine light bulb testing, we used an integrating sphere. That type of equipment can give you a ton of information for a light source, including brightness in lumens, color rendering index and more. Read more about our light bulb test lab.

For this category, I am interested in light. Unfortunately, these string lights could not be tested on our integrating sphere, but with some fancy math wizardry, I changed the calculations we needed from a sphere to a linear path and created a usable that solution. Using a standard digital light meterI got an estimate of each bulb’s light output in lumens.

Looking at the chart above, you can see the brightness of an individual bulb from each strand, as well as the total brightness of the entire strand from the solar and battery-powered options. Real Life bulbs are dim. Hampton Bay has the brightest individual bulb, while Coleman says the brightest strand in this series overall is due to the higher bulb count.

Of the AC-powered options shown below, Brightech brings the brightest individual bulbs to about 196 lumens. Multiply that by 15 bulbs and you’ll almost hit 3,000 lumens. Magitec wins the brightest overall with 30 bulbs at 165 lumens, for a total of almost 5,000 lumens. To be fair, Magitec offers two strands for the price of one, so an individual strand would be around 2,500 lumens; about 500 under a Brightech strand.