Real Disaster Situation Lights

[Hoghead]

Charles Bradshaw,
Thanks!

 

[Neko2]

Back in the 2003 outage I was without power for 7 days.
This was all back before I even knew anything about ARC, Inova, Surefire or any of the other premium lights.
Luckily I had an eternalight 3x, 4 mini mags and a 3 d Mag. I left the eternalight on the lowest setting the whole time and upped it when I wanted a bit more light. The minimags were good for foraging through the house and the 3d worked great for keeping an eye on the dog in the yard.

I had a stash of those glow sticks that you crack and shake and made a nice room light with a couple. I used 3 aol cds taped together as a triangle reflector and got a nice amount of soft light from whatever I threw at them.

I had a great little radio that takes AA batteries. It's one of those crappy "baby boombox" radios that were given away free with just about everything a few years back. It had been using the same (fuji alkaline) batteries for about 8 months before the power outage (with daily use of about 30-45 min) and used for 8-10 hours a day during. I just had to change the batteries a week ago. It was a "lifelong" brand. It was plenty loud and pulled in our AM emergency broadcast station perfectly.

I also had a case of bottled water, LOTS of batteries, powerbars, trail mix, beef jerky, a bunch of frozen meat and a fresh 20# bag of charcoal.

Besides not having A/C it was pretty comfy.
I liked having one of the only lit houses on the block (hopefully the looters would pass me up and go somewhere darker).

Ever since then I've been buying and keeping more emergency type items around just in case.

The hysteria when I tried ot find a bag of ice at the gas station was enough to motivate me to not have to go there.

N2

 

[CalgaryGuy]

I guest that everyone can survive with Mags... Well, 99% of the population only have Mags and 99.9% population survive power outage. But premium lights makes the situation better /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

 

[Neko2]

[ QUOTE ]
CalgaryGuy said:
I guest that everyone can survive with Mags... Well, 99% of the population only have Mags and 99.9% population survive power outage. But premium lights makes the situation better /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm sort of looking forward to the next power outage just to be able to play with all my new lights /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

The eternalight was spectacular under pressure though.

 

[Charles Bradshaw]

Hoghead: you're welcome!

I keep a couple of months of food on hand, including powerbars.

A versalux PR-2 LED bulb in a 2D mag makes it better. hehehe

 

[rocketmaninphx]

Looks like you folks all live in areas with possible weather releated or grid failure based power loss. I'm form California where the earth sometimes moves.

Being part of this I've got plenty of flashlights (LED and conventional)

But here are some observations.

I got caught in the Northridge Earthquake back in the mid 90's.

I was prepared:
Lots of Batteries (All Sizes)
Battery Powered Lights, Radio and Television.
Candles in those glass & aluminum folding lamps.
Lots of Water
Food able to be eaten without cooking(Meal Bars)

Stash a set of everything in every closet in the house.
(Everybody used to laugh at me when they saw the water in my closets)

and 2 key Items
Bar-B-Que with a large full bag of unopened Charcoal
Military Coleman Liquid Fuel Lantern
(runs on anything petro (Gasoline) based including I understand salad oil)

Lots of light that you can refuel from almost anything
And cooking with no power (Cook all the stuff melting in your freezer Don't open the door and it will keep longer)

In the southwestern US we do not have the harsh winter that you Northeasters and Midwesters do.

Have added a few more things to my supplies (Y2K).
Freeplay Radios & Flashlights
(When you run out of Batteries)
Multiple tanks for my Gas Bar B Que
(Still always have an unopened large bag of Charcoal and conventional Bar B Que for that seroius Bar B Que work)
Solar Battery Rechargers (Brunton 10 Cell AA/AAA w/Solar)

Just wanted to point out that you need alternatives when the Batteries run out. Renewable energy sources.

In 72 hours you are likely to use up all of your consumable energy sources.

BTW: When I moved to AZ figured out the worst thing that could happen would be a power failure or AC failure in the Summer and it would just be uncomfortable. It has happened twice...

and if you decide to carry protection make sure you have an out of site carry method and permit if required with plenty of consumables.

 

[Charles Bradshaw]

Gary;

Good points. However, stashing things in closets requires there to be room in said closets. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

I keep 11 gallons of water on hand, but only use 1/2 gallon plus 1 liter, on a routine basis (coffee, tea, cocoa). Every so often I will cycle through the rest and refill, or simply dump and refill.

The batteries I use routinely, are NiMH AAs, though I need to restock AA Lithium and Alkalines, some Ds, and soon enough, some more Cs.

I go for runtime over brightness due to income and income source. Not to mention thinking about the what if scenarios my mind can come up with. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif This is one reason I had DSpeck make my custom 2C pack for the Arc LS. C cells are cheap enough, and extend the runtime.

After all, it merely giving some thought to the matter and making reasonable preparation for a reasonable worst case (duration), though certainly longer than the propaganda of 72 hours. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

 

[paulr]

Flashlights for 72 hours isn't a big deal. Of the 72 hours, on average 36 will be daylight (flashlight not needed). Of the 36 dark hours, 24 will be spent sleeping (flashlight not needed). That leaves 12 hours which is easily covered by a pair of D cells in a typical household flashlight. Flashaholics maybe tend to be too wrapped up in portability (AA and CR123 cells) to think about D cells, but D's are cheap and have about 10x as much energy as an AA.

 

[rocketmaninphx]

You forgot that you may need the flashlights during those 36 daylight hours to enter buildings and multiple members of your family will want lights for security under ambigious conditions. Thanks for the LED Movement with the ability to provide a light for a significantly longer period than the old incandesents. Even an old D Cell incandesent will be dead in a few hours.

As far a sleeping 24 or the 72, not too sure I want to be totally asleep in a metropolitan or even major suburban area when emergancy service personnel are otherwise occupied or you are part of emergancy services.

Modern office buildings get really dark without power after the emergancy lights die. Ever try to shop or get supplies in a store with no overhead lighting, pretty dark in the back of a grocery store. Although we have few homes with basements out west they don't get very light during daylight hours or does the center of an powered down house.

Lanterns also provide light for a gathering place and are more condusive group activities when its dark.

I like the 1W units on D cells for the long run time but the entire world seems to be moving to AA's these days.
When I was growing up everything ran on D's Flashlights, Radios, Battery TV's. In the last 10 years our mobile world is shrinking everything and reducing power consumption. Now everything is trending to smaller power sources and rechargable.

If I remember correctly the last power outage in the NE took over 72 hours for full recovery as did the last PNW one.

Heck it took AZ multiple weeks to get our Fuel supply fixed.

One of the keys to this reality is the drive to reduce cost of operation. (Revenue - Cost = Profit) When the bean counters look at the numbers, emergency recovery only happens once every 2 or so years and cost constraints will reduce this coverage to a legal minimum. Hence the long recovery's from service loss in major disasters will continue. (Power/Water/Teleco/Fuel Distribution)

Let's see Family of 4 for 72 hours each with lights consuming 6 AA's per day is 72 Batteries. Dosn't even count the Battery TV or Radio.

Got Power...

Perhaps this is part of the justification for this hobby.

 

[paulr]

If you're an emergency response worker, you're going to have professional equipment including lights specified by your organization and this whole discussion doesn't really apply to you.

D cell incandescents run for 10-20 hours, really they do, and even longer if you use the lower powered bulbs intended for AA's. There's some LED bulbs available for them too, but they're a bit overpriced IMO, even the 5mm ones.

Grocery stores don't stay open for business if it's pitch dark in the store. (The one near me in the NE blackout set up some of those candles in glass jars, which was enough).

If you're in an office building that goes dark and you need to get out, that shouldn't take more than a few minutes, maybe an hour tops in some wreckage situations. In the WTC case, it was about 2 hours from when the planes hit til the buildings collapsed.

For comfort lighting sitting around a house, 5mm LED's are enough, really they are. A 1AA CMG Infinity does the job fine for around 40 hours nonstop on one AA alkaline. An LED candle with two D cells would run for weeks or months.

What does it mean about the world moving to AA's? It doesn't mean you can't get D's any more. They are still easy to find everywhere (of course during the NE blackout, stores sold out of them, but they also sold out of AA's).

During the NE blackout, the Arc AAA in my pocket was really all my family needed, and something like a Photon squeeze light actually would have been enough. We used the AAA as a candle for sitting around talking, but only because we had plenty of batteries on hand, otherwise we would have done fine without that. My mom had a radio/tape player powered by four D cells that we used for news. It ran at least 40 hours on four 25 cent "heavy duty" cells, not even alkalines.

Right now I'm EDC'ing a Countycomm coin light set up with one 2032 cell for 40+ hours of runtime at about 1/10th the brightness of an Arc AAA. Even that's more than enough light to find one's way around a dark home or office. Everyone should have one of those. Brighter lights are important but usually won't need nearly that much runtime.

A lot (not all) of the emergency preparedness thing for many of us seems like a rationalization for our flashaholism. We can be happier about it if we just tell ourselves instead "I buy these flashlights because I like them". Certainly knife collectors who buy decorated Sebenzas and suchlike aren't under many illusions about practicality. There's nothing wrong with appreciating something that's well designed and well made. If you take a photograph that you really like, a really good enlarging and framing job will run you a few hundred bucks minimum, and then it just hangs on the wall doing absolutely nothing except making you happy when you look at it, and yet that's a perfectly valid reason to do it. Flashaholism is the same way.

 

[Double_A]

rocketmaninphx-

Good post! The kind of post that comes from experience! Yours follows nicely with some of the points I made early on in this thread.

Often "lights out" are caused by other emergency situations that have to be taken into consideration. Stress that accompanies these situation changes the situation, sometimes drastically changing what you think you need.

Most of the responses given here are based on a single guy toughing it out alone. I urge everone to consider not themselves, but how will the family cope. The situation may not be the same a an enjoyable camping trip or a few hours without power. It may occur due to super stressful full blown emergency! With possible injuries or God forbid a death of a family member. How will eveyone cope when Daddy is injured? How will your kids cope know you need medical attention, living out in their back yard, because their home is wrecked and supplies are not readily available because the second floor of your home is colapsed upon the first floor? This is no joke. That may be a worst case situation but that is not unrealistic.

Think about multiple sources of light in case the primary is unavailable.

Consider being away from home.

Consider destruction of property and inaccessible supplies.

Consider how will this effect the least emotionally stable family member.

Consider these and you will be more prepared.

GregR

 

[paulr]

I just don't see going crazy with all these expensive lights and recharging systems as being all that cost effective. If you want to equip a family of five to the teeth with lights, the following should be enough:

1) Everyone should have a coin cell keychain light that they carry all the time. The Countycomm $1.00 lights are fine for this.

2) Buy a bunch of Koehler Brightstar 2D or 3D yellow industrial flashlights, $5 each at brightguy. They have spare bulbs in the tailcap. Buy a bunch of additional spare bulbs. Put dimmer bulbs (PR4 250 mA) in the ones that will be left on as comfort lights, e.g. the ones you give to the kids. You can write the kids' names on the lights in magic marker, so those become their personal lights. Two alkaline D's should run a PR4 for 40+ hours. If you want to be fancy, put some 5mm LED bulbs in some of the 3D lights ($8 or so each). They will run practically forever. Alkaline D cells are $9.99 for a 12-pack at Walgreens. Keep a spare 12-pack or two around. Make a point of checking the cells once a year or so, cycling them into devices that use them up. Big flashlights are better than small ones for home use because they're harder to lose. A few pocket lights, headlamps, etc. are of course also handy, and you may need some AA's for those. Or a Coleman 8D fluorescent lantern, about 29 bucks.

3) Have a medium sized boom-box radio around that runs on D cells. Boom boxes are better than pocket radios for this because 1) they're harder to misplace, 2) they will play loud enough to fill a room so several people can listen at once without straining, 3) they'll run for quite a long time (24+ hours) on a set of D cells.

4) If you might need 120 volt power for short periods (e.g. to get your furnace started) but don't want to buy a generator, you can get a power inverter for your car. A 300 watt one is around 60 bucks (but I don't know if that's enough to start a furnace). Don't forget extension cords to reach in from the garage or driveway. Obviously you don't want to leave your car running parked for too long, though. A computer UPS is another approach to this.

5) Small 12 volt gadgets (NiMH AA charger, cell phone charger) can be powered by your car's battery with the engine turned off, without draining the car battery enough to worry about, if you're not doing it constantly. If you want to top off the car battery afterwards, just run the engine for a little while.

 

[CalgaryGuy]

Good point, all family member should have 2 lights. Their primilary light should be what suit them then a back-up light in case the main one die.

 

[BlindTiger]

All I know is we were lucky this time. The Blackout in NYC lasted a little over 24 hours before power was restored to ALL areas. No one was taking it seriously. Yes, I'm a party pooper but it was serious for me to walk up 18 flights. The emergency lighting went out the next day. Conserving water and finding stuff to eat.
Lightwise, I agree with a lot of what Paulr says. I'm wondering what the runtime for the Countycomm lights are. Some seem brighter than others from the bag I bought.
Flashlights was not really a big deal. Lots of people had candles and it served them fine.
Maybe it was because I was one of the few that didn't have a "connection" so I'm bitter.
discuss.

 

[paulr]

More cheap lights: http://www.cheapbatteries.com/flash.htm

For equipping a family, I'd much rather have ten of those Eveready 2D lights (above) at $1.50 each with batteries, than one fancy LED light that costs twice as much as the ten 2D lights put together. Note that the $5.00 ones with the alkaline batteries are waterproof, so you might want a few of those as well if you have to fix stuff outside in bad weather.

The Countycomm lights should run for around 1 hour at reasonable brightness and several more hours somewhat dimly. That should be plenty to get out of an office building or subway. As mentioned, running the CC light on 1x2032 should give dim but useable light for 40+ hours. Batterystation has 2032's for 30 cents each.

The NYC blackout could have been much worse. It was actually pretty nice, a vacation from the usual city hustle, because it hit on a summer day in mid-afternoon. I didn't even realize it was a widespread blackout til I'd walked several blocks and then found some folks gathered around a car, that had its doors open and its radio playing the news reports. The only real need for flashlights in the building I was visiting was for walking through the stairwells after the emergency lights gave out. The rest of the time, it was just a matter of using the daylight and going to bed when it got dark. But if you think of ways it could have been worse or gone longer, more flashlights just wouldn't have helped that much.

 

[CalgaryGuy]

Paul, you have a good point there. Sometime, having a dozen of light is better than having one good light. But in case of evacuation, I rather take one good light.

 

[Charles Bradshaw]

Paulr is correct that you don't need expensive lights for this sort of thing. As an example, I use a Brinkmann Rebel hanging from my bed's headboard for a night light. All I do is reach over and turn it on, and the light reflects from the ceiling. That is more than enough light to see by, and the light costs from $15 to $20 depending on where you get it. It is certainly worth the price to me, for that. The same with my Eveready 2 LED Folding Lantern. I also have a couple of those Krill lights.

I would rather pay more than $2-3 and get something reliable, than spend $2-3 and end up with a light that refuses to work when I absolutely need it to work. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif That doesn't mean that I would spend $150 for one light for this sort of purpose (dedicated). /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

Of course, we are flashaholics, and usually don't think in terms of the normal person's flashlight paradigm. Everyone here has different needs, as well as likes and dislikes in lights.

 

[CalgaryGuy]

Yeah, that's where the Mag comes in, at $15 to $20 a light.

Too bad that StreamLight doesn't mass produce their Twin-Task 2D. If they do, they can probably drop their price to $25 a light which will be a great competitor to Mag 2D.

Paul, I didn't mean to offend you if I did. You did gave me ideas of what to use my cheap light that came with the emergency kit. As for me, it's just me and my girlfriend so for us, having my small amount of light is good. All of them (cheap and not so cheap) adds up to about a dozen. But when it comes to evacuation, I know which light to take /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

 

[paulr]

Nah, no offense, just the usual lively discussion /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif.

I don't see much point to Mags, though I have a couple. Those Eveready Halogens are actually pretty good lights. They're tough and waterproof and the switches are reliable. Since the batteries alone are worth about $2, you're getting the light for $3. I guess at that price I'd get them in preference to the cheapo $1.00 2D lights which aren't waterproof and which have the standard cheesy side-slide switch. The one possible drawback of the Halogens is they have a high current (but bright) bulb. You might want to swap it out for more runtime.

The Koehler Brightstars are also good, used on factory floors all over the place. They weigh a lot less than a Mag does. They have a spare bulb tailcap like the Mags. I haven't used one in a while so don't remember whether they're waterproof or whether they have a lanyard hole. The lanyard of a big light is of course a good place to hang yet another coin cell light.

Finally I've seen some fairly sturdy looking new Eveready 2D lights in the drugstore, that are around $8 including two alkaline D's, and that have a blinking red LED built into the barrel, so you can find the light easily in the dark. The LED uses little enough power that the two D's can run it for several years. So that's another light that might be worth a look. D's just make much more sense than AA's or 123's for a light that you're going to use at home.

 

[TORCH_BOY]

When the worst of the worst happens
and you dont have a flashlight,
nothing beats the old Candle.