Putting the flashlights to use; with a cautionary note

So, I live in Seattle and this past week we had a pretty major windstorm. Power was taken out all over the greater metro area and the whole state.
A ton of folks still are without. Which brings me to my story...

A while back I got into this forum, my first "CPF-approved" light was the StreamLight ProPoly 4AA Luxeon. I took it to my grandparent's when I went over to work on their computer. While I was there, my grandfather checked out the flashlight, and really got into it. So I decided to get one for them for Christmas. They live out in Woodinville, a fairly rural suburb of Seattle, in an older development with lots of trees and frequent power outages.

Long story short, this storm hits, they are out of power, but we have our traditional tree-decorating dinner planned. They want to go ahead with it, so I load up some lights and decide to give them their Christmas present early.

I have to say, having two SL PP 4AA Lux, a Fenix L1S, and my brand-new SL Stinger LED (which I have loaned them along with a car-charger) helped a lot. They had a variety of plastic supermarket lights with batteries in various states of charge, along with a couple of camp lanterns. All told, we had enough light for the common areas and enough flashlights for anyone who needed one to have one.

Okay, now the caution: be very very careful with candles! My mom managed to catch the hood of her sweatshirt on fire when she backed up to a fireplace with a candle on the mantle. She made it through unscathed--not even singed hair--thanks to "Stop Drop and Roll." (That really works!)

Another way to justify flashlight ownership for preparedness--they are way safer than candles or other open flames for illumination.

Anyway, that's my story. Any other Pacific NW CPFers with stories?

-Rick

RickB said:

So, I live in Seattle and this past week we had a pretty major windstorm. Power was taken out all over the greater metro area and the whole state.
A ton of folks still are without. Which brings me to my story...

A while back I got into this forum, my first "CPF-approved" light was the StreamLight ProPoly 4AA Luxeon. I took it to my grandparent's when I went over to work on their computer. While I was there, my grandfather checked out the flashlight, and really got into it. So I decided to get one for them for Christmas. They live out in Woodinville, a fairly rural suburb of Seattle, in an older development with lots of trees and frequent power outages.

Long story short, this storm hits, they are out of power, but we have our traditional tree-decorating dinner planned. They want to go ahead with it, so I load up some lights and decide to give them their Christmas present early.

I have to say, having two SL PP 4AA Lux, a Fenix L1S, and my brand-new SL Stinger LED (which I have loaned them along with a car-charger) helped a lot. They had a variety of plastic supermarket lights with batteries in various states of charge, along with a couple of camp lanterns. All told, we had enough light for the common areas and enough flashlights for anyone who needed one to have one.

Okay, now the caution: be very very careful with candles! My mom managed to catch the hood of her sweatshirt on fire when she backed up to a fireplace with a candle on the mantle. She made it through unscathed--not even singed hair--thanks to "Stop Drop and Roll." (That really works!)

Another way to justify flashlight ownership for preparedness--they are way safer than candles or other open flames for illumination.

Anyway, that's my story. Any other Pacific NW CPFers with stories?

-Rick

Click to expand...

I'm reporting from Corvallis OR, a small town 80 miles south of Portland. I was without power for ~16 hours. I used two lights. That same light you got to carry around, and a Mag 4D LED.

The Mag 4D LED is probably about as bright as the Streamlight, but it has an unparalleled run time for the output/price. It is supposed go around 43 hours of regulated output on fresh set of alkaline batteries. There are many many LED light that goes into triple digit hours, but most are nowhere near as bright and dims considerably as the battery is consumed. It works good as a pretty bright incredibly tall and heavy that burns safely for 43hrs.

The Streamlight is a great light w/ pretty good run time, but it doesn't have quite enough runtime for long power outages.

I agree that the StreamLights I had aren't ideally suited for extended power outage situations. I haven't yet gotten around to filling in that part of my inventory--I just took what I had. Hopefully the Stinger LED will be helpful for them. I showed them how to access the low setting, and that combined with the car charger should keep it alive long enough. One thing I'm kicking myself over is that I have a four-pack of AAs that I should have given them as spares for the SL 4AA.

-Rick

I live with my mom and sister and we were out of power from about 6pm Thursday till 2am Monday. We are in the Auburn, WA area where temperatures got down to 26 degrees all weekend. From my time in the dark I learned several things…

1.AWAYS HAVE A HEAD LIGHT. Lanterns are nice, and a head light is never going to be as easy or out of site as a torch for EDC but when you have to get something done in the dark there is no better way then having a head light. I use my Princeton Tec Apex on 4x Lithium AA's and never had a problem even with HEVEY USE for cooking and general day to day life.

2.Have OPTIONS, between the three of us and the nabbor across the street, all of my lights saw at least a little use. The most used at home were, 4D lantern in the family/dining room, M@G 3D Led, M@G 2C LED, KL1-R on E2E, 6P BOG 3 watt, PP4AA 3 watt, and my PT Apex.

3.Have a stock of important batterers (The less you have to go look for things the less gas you will burn in your car). Also standardizing on a battery type is good, I have standard batters for family /General/ Loaning out, with a good back log of 2 changed for the two large M@G lights (3D and 2C's) and a LARGE pack of AA's. I ran all of the lights I was usesing off of lithium. The only battery change was day 3. I had to change the batterers in my EDC E2E KL1-R because it was used a lot and the batterers were already fairly low (30% on ZTS on Thursday at the start of power outage).

All in all it was a good flashlight vacation except for the cold and no shower problem. Hope everyone out there in CPF land stays warm and gets power back in a timely fashion. OH YA just a note a Jetboil stove is irreplaceable for making Coffey and freeze dried food, I went through almost a full canster of gass cooking on it this weekend.

I'm in Kitsap Co., we had power out for a couple nights. I bounced between my Surefire Aviator, a BlackDiamond LED headlamp (don't know the model, 5 Leds, orange exterior), some 5 LED AAA click-lights I got at Costco, and a Coleman flouresent lantern. The click-lights work pretty well when left on a table pointed at a white ceiling, they make a nice area-light.