Kitchen Panda
Enlightened
While looking for flashlight-related stuff on the Web, I ran across some papers by a Master's student at Humboldt State University, Jennifer Tracy, and papers from something called the "Lumina Project" about ...flashlights! Specifically, this is about flashlights in Kenya. In rural Kenya there's not a lot of street lighting or electrical distribution, so flashlights are apparently owned by half of all households.
Ms. Tracy's thesis I think would be interesting to CPF members as it talks about a lot of the things we CPF's talk about. There's a set of product reviews. There's beamshots (well, beam diagrams) and lux readings. There's runtime measurements. There's even comments on angry blue LEDs ( I don't think I've ever seen a 10,000 K CCT).
If you think flashlights are expensive here, check out the prices - Kenyan villagers pay anywhere from $1.40 to about $6 for a flashlight, but that's in a place where the average household income is $65 a month. The worst part is that the quality of these lights is wretched - the participants in the survey reported an average life span of 3 months. Yes, these are Chinese-made flashlights but nowhere near the level of QA we'd expect from our favorite dealers.
You think CR123's are expensive - in Kenya the typical flashlight needs two 40-cent batteries every 2 weeks. Again, remember that they earn as much in a month as we earn between breakfast and lunch each day; this is comparable to the drugstore price we might see for CR123's. Householders tend to buy disposable batteries, while night watchmen and bicycle taxi drivers use mostly rechargeables; it can cost 25 or 30 cents to recharge a flashlight at a charging shop, and householders tend not to have access to "free" charging at work or in town. LED's are standard, though one participant in the survey did have a modded LED flashlight that he'd turned into an incandescent.
Tracy writes about night watchmen at truck stops who will carry a rechargeable flashlight and also a backup - demonstrating that "1=none, 2=1" is applicable all over the world. The preferred rechargeable is a sealed-lead-acid, but when you're paying less than $10 for a flashlight the quality is very poor...Ms. Tracy works out how many hundreds of tons of lead per year must be produced by chucking broken flashlights in Kenya.
The thesis is a good read; I won't post the URL but if you Google for "Humboldt" and "Tracy_Thesis_3May10_final.pdf" you should find it very quickly. There's a lot of stuff on the Web related to this project.
Bill
( I'd nominate Ms. Tracy as an honorary member of CPF.)
Ms. Tracy's thesis I think would be interesting to CPF members as it talks about a lot of the things we CPF's talk about. There's a set of product reviews. There's beamshots (well, beam diagrams) and lux readings. There's runtime measurements. There's even comments on angry blue LEDs ( I don't think I've ever seen a 10,000 K CCT).
If you think flashlights are expensive here, check out the prices - Kenyan villagers pay anywhere from $1.40 to about $6 for a flashlight, but that's in a place where the average household income is $65 a month. The worst part is that the quality of these lights is wretched - the participants in the survey reported an average life span of 3 months. Yes, these are Chinese-made flashlights but nowhere near the level of QA we'd expect from our favorite dealers.
You think CR123's are expensive - in Kenya the typical flashlight needs two 40-cent batteries every 2 weeks. Again, remember that they earn as much in a month as we earn between breakfast and lunch each day; this is comparable to the drugstore price we might see for CR123's. Householders tend to buy disposable batteries, while night watchmen and bicycle taxi drivers use mostly rechargeables; it can cost 25 or 30 cents to recharge a flashlight at a charging shop, and householders tend not to have access to "free" charging at work or in town. LED's are standard, though one participant in the survey did have a modded LED flashlight that he'd turned into an incandescent.
Tracy writes about night watchmen at truck stops who will carry a rechargeable flashlight and also a backup - demonstrating that "1=none, 2=1" is applicable all over the world. The preferred rechargeable is a sealed-lead-acid, but when you're paying less than $10 for a flashlight the quality is very poor...Ms. Tracy works out how many hundreds of tons of lead per year must be produced by chucking broken flashlights in Kenya.
The thesis is a good read; I won't post the URL but if you Google for "Humboldt" and "Tracy_Thesis_3May10_final.pdf" you should find it very quickly. There's a lot of stuff on the Web related to this project.
Bill
( I'd nominate Ms. Tracy as an honorary member of CPF.)