3 hour power cut, my best torch ... headlamp

We had a 3 hour power cut midnight, yipee.

2 years to the day since the last major one.

(Apparently another local one was caused by a squirrel on the line.)

We live in the country, so it was totally pitch black outside.

I have loads of PIR LEDs inside, so no problem there for general low level lighting.

So, I played with several of my torches, including 1 2xflouro with 12v battery from Woolworths £10 in sale last year.

However, I came to the conclusion my best blackout torch in the house was a simple 5 led AAA headlamp bought for £2 in Netto recently, has a circuit, for strobe etc, and lasts 6 hours on new AAAx3.

Second best was a Superbright 1v-5v LED bulb in a 58p Tesco AAx2 torch.

So despite having P3Ds with diffusers, and various other torches, I really only needed to spend <£6 !!

Main bugbear after getting power back was resetting all the VHS and DVD recorders, most lost time or timer settings, however the cheapest VHS didn't lose anything.

I would have gone outside for a play, but my wife was sleeping.

And what to do with NO TV and NO Internet.

Playing with my various torches took up most of a hour.

Good training for hurricane Hanna though, only problem is, I am staying here whilst she flies to SC Saturday, should be eventful.

And yes, she is going with plenty of torches and batteries, her relatives think they have a torch somewhere !

And that's after a trip to their local Walmart to stock up with food & water.

I'm off to get some more of the £2 headlamps, you can never have too many.

abvidledUK said:

We had a 3 hour power cut midnight, yipee.

2 years to the day since the last major one.

(Apparently another local one was caused by a squirrel on the line.)

We live in the country, so it was totally pitch black outside.

I have loads of PIR LEDs inside, so no problem there for general low level lighting.

So, I played with several of my torches, including 1 2xflouro with 12v battery from Woolworths £10 in sale last year.

However, I came to the conclusion my best blackout torch in the house was a simple 5 led AAA headlamp bought for £2 in Netto recently, has a circuit, for strobe etc, and lasts 6 hours on new AAAx3.

Second best was a Superbright 1v-5v LED bulb in a 58p Tesco AAx2 torch.

So despite having P3Ds with diffusers, and various other torches, I really only needed to spend <£6 !!

Main bugbear after getting power back was resetting all the VHS and DVD recorders, most lost time or timer settings, however the cheapest VHS didn't lose anything.

I would have gone outside for a play, but my wife was sleeping.

And what to do with NO TV and NO Internet.

Playing with my various torches took up most of a hour.

Good training for hurricane Hanna though, only problem is, I am staying here whilst she flies to SC Saturday, should be eventful.

And yes, she is going with plenty of torches and batteries, her relatives think they have a torch somewhere !

And that's after a trip to their local Walmart to stock up with food & water.

I'm off to get some more of the £2 headlamps, you can never have too many.

Click to expand...

Don't know about you but I would have woken up the wifey

superflytnt said:

Don't know about you but I would have woken up the wifey

Click to expand...

Depends....... I think some would think it's better that they didn't wake up.





Bill

However, I came to the conclusion my best blackout torch in the house was a simple 5 led AAA headlamp bought for £2 in Netto recently, has a circuit, for strobe etc, and lasts 6 hours on new AAAx3.

Click to expand...

Headlamps are way under-rated and overlooked. Good ones are small, light, cheap and run on Li cells that keep forever. I just added a Petzl e+lite to my gear. For $20, you can't beat this thing for emergency use.

Headlamps are IMO the most overlooked item in power outage situations and the best thing to have during one as they allow you more freedom to get things done. I do however find the 3AAA headlamps more and more of a nuisance as much as I use one and stumbled onto the sale of the rayovac 1AA headlamps and use that one daily now because you can change the battery with the headlamp on your head still in less than a minute. I keep a spare nimh in my pocket now. I wish I could find a headlamp similar to it that takes 2AAs for 50% more runtime and a little brighter and more modes with less colored LEDs.... blue? red? phooey give me white only.

I agree 100% that the headlamp has been my most use and useful light in all outages since the big one of 2003. They just make doing almost any normal chore so much easier than holding a light by hand.

I use mt edc for dog walking, local neighborhood stuff, but for camping/emergency use, I always go right for a headlamp, just ordered another one today.

My 5 led Lenser is my best light for doing timing belts on cars. It put the light on anything i am looking at and doesn't require frequent repositioning.

abvidledUK said:

I'm off to get some more of the £2 headlamps, you can never have too many.

Click to expand...

I figure I'm on to a good thing at the local discount variety shop, which sells 7-LED headlamps for about US$2.60. They make great donor bodies for mod projects, one of which is my most useful light. Headlamps really are useful.

We had a 2.25 hour power cut here just two days ago, but it was during the afternoon.

superflytnt, you don't need to quote the whole post, you know. We're quite capable of reading post 1 ourselves.

PT Apex, with 4xAA, and moded with P4.

We don't get outages here. I've had less than 30 minutes of power out since January 4th 1990 when I moved in to my present house. The last power outage in the previous place was in 1975 lasting less than a minute.

In my entire time here (1964-1978, 1982-1984, 1986-early 1989 late 1989-present) I've been without power for about 2 hours in total. 1960-64 in Glasgow I can't remember.

Feb 84 - Aug 86 were another story - 3 nights of power in 800 days. And I didn't own a single electric light.

However, I did own two Tilley (Coleman) lamps that ran on paraffin (Which I could not get so ran them on petrol (gasoline) which meant I needed a constant supply of seals since the petrol ate them. It gets mildly exciting running a device at 1000 centigrade when it is spraying petrol vapour everywhere!) Problem with those is the kilowatt or so of heat they pump out. This is a problem when you live in a desert.

78-82 I don't remember a single power outage.

Two outages here since 1990, totaling 28 minutes. Both of them were due to people being careless with a backhoe.

Have enough charged AAs to keep the Zebralight running until 2015 probably and can always charge stuff at work anyway (2,000kVA generators x 6). One of the nice things about working in a hospital. Could probably run 10 days on the rest of the lights (That have cells in them) before I even start on the headlights.