Last week I plugged in the 12v desk lamp into the rehabbed Goal 0 battery to see how long it would run. Well, today is about a week since then and the little battery meter says it’s down to approximately 40% charge.
So, seven days at 24 hour usage means I could run this thing for six hours every night for a month. Or eight hours a night for three weeks. Thats a not inconsiderable amount of time to have ‘normal’ lighting.
Sometimes it’s hard to wrap your head around something like an economic collapse, a gigantic earthquake, a global pandemic, etc, but pretty much everyone can relate to a blackout or loss of electricity because we’ve all experienced it before at some point in our lives. A power failure is probably the ‘disaster’ that the majority of people can relate to. Not everyone thinks keeping a case of 5.56 and years worth of freeze drieds is a good idea, but pretty much everyone has a flashlight at home.
Anyway, as I mentioned in the previous post on the subject, I like keeping a couple battery-in-a-box type of items on hand so that I can just set up a light source and pretty much not have to worry about it. I’ve yet to experience the outage that lasts more than a day and at the moment I have the resources to not have to sit in the dark for an entire month.
Gotta say, man….Ii remember when LED lighting started to be a thing. I recall thinking that if it delivered the lighting they promised at the low-usage rates they calculated it would revolutionize emergency lighting and low-power lighting systems for remote locations. Apparently it lived up to the hype.
I remember hearing some people almost crying out to heaven that “the world was coming to an end” when the old incandescent light bulbs were targeted. Some urged buying dozens of bulbs for long term storage.
As I write this, my keyboard is illuminated by an LED bulb in the lamp to my left. I have not noticed any difference between the illumination it provides and when compared to the old incandescent bulbs of the past, and I appreciate the difference each month when I open my electric bill.
In a grid down situation, in particular, the LED light sources will be much appreciated.
I’m a big fan of LED bulbs. That being said, they put out a TON of full-spectrum RF noise! If you use a radio, ham radio or otherwise, around an LED bulb, all you’re going to HEAR is that noise! Try it at home with your AM/FM radio. Prepare to be astounded!
The issue then was that LED wasn’t ready for primetime and we were being stuck with those craptastic “compact fluorescent” bulbs.
I agree, and the world as we know it survived.
I am confident that at least one of the factors in the furthering the adaptation LEDs for home lighting use was that the fluorescent lights WERE crap.
Thanks to Costco, all the lights in my home are LED’s and I have a Faraday caged box that has, along with some electronic replacement parts, a radio and a laptop, a dozen LED bulbs. In our living room is a floor lamp with 2 LED bulbs and when the power goes off a battery box come out and the lamp gets plugged in. It produces enough light for us to read and I’ve yet had to use it long enough to kill the battery.
BTW Commander, thank you for the shout out about the CAT Digital Power Station a while back. I picked up 2 and they are wonderful.
Have you considered a few UVPaqlite products as well ? Not battery power, but glow in dark from ANY light source. I keep a pouch or two hung from our bedroom ceiling fans – pretty nice night light. Light lasts approximately five or six hours, but can be recharged with a 30 second lighting from a flashlight very easily. Pretty cool unit.
Feather light like a sheet of paper. Unlimited life span. Can be immersed in water with no ill effects. And not very expensive for what it offers.
Back in 1980 (long before LED or much in the way of battery boxes) I was living in Grand Island, Nebraska, with my wife and two small kids, when seven tornadoes visited.
We were lucky, we still had our house. People two blocks away had empty basements. We lost electricity and water for 10 days, and had very slow sewer connections for two weeks until a lift station got rebuilt.
Lack of lighting wasn’t much a problem, since by the time it got dark (energy-[stress+exercise]) we were ready to go to bed. (Which doesn’t mean I won’t need lighting in the future.)
The interesting find was that we were one of two families on our block with mechanical can openers. I taught several folks the joy and technique of the P-38.