My wife is wanting me to attach a solar light to the brick wall of the house. Because of a concrete "shelf" above the front door, which would shield the charging cells from seeing any sunlight, the light would need to be on an aluminium pole (supplied with the light in case it is needed) to extend it forwards of that shelf. But I am worried about the turning force of a weight of about 300 grammes on the end of a 40 cm pole that is screwed into a flat plate which it turn is screwed to the wall.
I always have problems with rawlplugs not really biting into the masonry that that are put into. I drill a hole of the correct diameter for the rawlplug - I've even tried using a slightly small drill to allow for the drill bit wandering a bit and leaving a hole that is larger than the drill bit.
Even if the rawlplug is a tight fit (maybe requiring a bit of gentle tapping to get it to go in) when I screw into it I often find with rawplugs that they turn as the screw is tightened or else they pull out. Getting a really solid fixing is a problem. Maybe our house just has soft crumbly bricks :-)
For this light, there's a large tuning moment (300 g on the end of a pole 40 cm long, fastened to a plate that is about 5x2 cm which has two screw holes about 4 cm apart in a horizontal line) and I'm worried that the light will just pull out, especially if there are gusts of wind or if starlings etc decide to land on it.
The alternative is to mount the light directly on the wall by means of two screws in the wall with their heads standing proud to lock into slots on the rear edge of the light - much less turning moment but the problem then is that the light sensor that turns it on at night has an incredible angle of view and could be triggered by climbing plants on the wall just below where the light is mounted.
My feeling is that it's a pretty crap design to have the charging cells on the upper surface so you can't mount the light under a "shelf" that is designed to shelter the front door and which has a movement sensor that can see such a wide angle of view.
I'm very tempted to overrule SWMBO and go for a three-part light where the sensor, charging cells and light are separate units that can be mounted in the best place for each - I have a couple of these which I know are great (we use them in other places) and they have configurable sensitivity and "on" time after triggering, whereas this unit is fixed sensitivity and fixed time (10 seconds).