crank led light

what is a good "bet your life in the dark" crank or shake LED light.
I'm looking for one for my mom and sister who are both retired and do not keep spare batteries in the home. I does not have to be "tactical" bright just bright enough to walk around the house in a power failure.

Answer: none.

A decent quality light with lots of runtime loaded with Energizer Ultimate lithium primaries (AA's or AAA's) is a much better solution IMO.

Something like a Gerber Infinity Ultra with a lithium AA battery installed (10 year shelf life) would provide days of runtime, or years of worry-free intermittent emergency use without all the shaking and cranking for just a few minutes of light.

A L91 is good for 20 years to 80%

Marduke said:

A L91 is good for 20 years to 80%

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Energizer e2 Photo L91 lithium batteries :thumbsup:

The Quark 2xAA is rated to run 30 days in moon mode.
http://www.4sevens.com/index.php?cPath=297&osCsid=37646190a356699f4cd208cade755498

A shake light is not such a bad idea in case of a long term power outage, if the grid is destroyed, batteries may be unavailable. Yes, there are people who want to destroy the power grid.

I would say a shake light is better than a crank light because cranks wear out.

I have this crank radio/flashlight:

And it has a nice, smooth crank.

The problem with crank lights is the cheap ones use LIR2032 cells, which are extremely easy to both overcharge, or over discharge. Crank it too much, or forget your maintenance, and it's dead when you need it.

Freeplay makes some very nice NiMH based crank lights, but again they require routine maintenance.

Shake lights (real ones, not the fake ones) don't require maintenance, but they do require an inordinate amount of vigorous shaking for an abysmal amount of light at a ridiculous runtime. For someone older (assuming, since you said retired), the charging method may be of no interest to them.

Check out Freeplat Energy. http://www.freeplayenergy.com/products
As far as crank lights they are tops. They do not use the latest leds but there lights and radios are built to last.

How about solar powered? Keep one of these on the windowsill, its always charged & ready.

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.19827

sabre7 said:

How about solar powered? Keep one of these on the windowsill, its always charged & ready.

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.19827

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Back to the LIR2032 problem. If you do that, the cells will eventually be destroyed, leaving you with a useless light.

i have a crank 3leds light, i picked it up on a flee market for $5, there is no name on it.
i can't complain, it works, everytime. there tonns of them on the market, from 5 to 20 bucks, some have a cellphone charger build in.
i,d say any of them is good enough for your purposes,
as for shake lights, stay away from cheap ones, back in the days when sharper image was in buissnes, they had a shake light, rubberized, rugged, was called hummer, but it only had 1 led,
cheap ones..lol. a friend of mine once bought a shake light for $2, it wasn't working, i removed the lens and to my surprise there was no led installed, so i put one in, it worked, so i desided to see how long it would run, i left it on, 3 hours later i came back it was still on, so i'm thinking wtf??? it is way too long for a cheap light powered by a capacitor. so i opened it, there was no capasitor, the shaker wasn't even meant to work, it had 3 coin cell batts. what a scam.


p.s. calume glow sticks work very well for power outage insde a house.

A decent AA light and this: http://store.sundancesolar.com/poaafosobach.html

For this kind of application, I strongly recommend this light:

http://www.sunnightsolar.com/

They come with three 800 mAh AA batteries that will run all night on a single day charge, but you can swap them out with a coin using any common higher-capacity NiMH cell and triple the run-time.

Mine easily run 60 hours on low with 2400 mAh cells when fully charged (takes about three days). Keep one in a window sill, and you will probably never need to replace it.

Proven by the millions around the world as a lantern replacement.

Six modes (one button, so foolproof):

Task Mode: High, med, low - Room Mode: High, med, low

They are even on sale right now for $25.99

I have five of them and love them, they are as close as you can get to perpetual motion machines.