The power went at half past eight and everyone did the same thing, which was hold a phone up and walk around casting a hard white circle on the ceiling. By eleven the phones were at thirty percent, nobody wanted to use them for light anymore, and the house was dark with four fully-functional torches sitting in a drawer with dead batteries in them. The phone is the thing you need working for information, for calls, for the outage map. It is the last thing that should be doing the lighting.
Three kinds of light, and you want all three
They are not substitutes. Each solves a problem the others do not.
1. A headlamp. The single most useful light in an emergency, and the one most households do not own. The reason is simple: it points where you look and leaves both hands free. Changing a fuse, carrying a child downstairs, holding a wrench — all of those need two hands. Fifteen to twenty-five dollars.
2. A lantern. Throws light in all directions and lights a room, rather than a circle. One on the kitchen table turns an outage from an ordeal into an evening. Look for one that stands and also hangs from a hook.
3. A handheld torch. For looking at something specific at a distance — the breaker panel, the yard, under the house.
A reasonable kit is one headlamp per person, two lanterns, and one good torch.
What the numbers on the box mean
- Lumens — total light produced. More is not automatically better: a 1,000-lumen torch indoors is blinding and eats batteries. For household use, 100 to 300 lumens is the useful range. Reserve the big numbers for outdoors.
- Runtime — always quoted at the lowest setting, so divide your expectations. A light claiming “100 hours” means 100 hours on a dim glow, perhaps six on high.
- Beam distance — mostly marketing for indoor use.
- IPX rating — water resistance. IPX4 handles rain. IPX7 survives being dropped in a puddle. Worth having on at least one light.
The specification that actually matters and is rarely advertised: a genuine low mode. A light that will run at twenty lumens for eighty hours is far more useful across a three-day outage than one that only does bright.
Batteries: the decision that determines whether it works
This is where emergency lights fail, and it is not about the light.
Standardise on one battery size across every light you own — AA is the sensible choice, because it is the size you can still find in a gas station at midnight. A kit where the lantern takes D cells, the torch takes CR123 and the headlamp takes AAA is a kit where two of the three are dead.
Store batteries outside the devices. Alkaline cells leak as they age and destroy whatever they are sitting in. Tape a bundle to each light.
Use lithium AAs in anything that sits unused. Ten to twenty year shelf life, and they do not leak. Three times the price and the only upgrade that genuinely matters here.
Rechargeable lights are convenient and have one flaw: they self-discharge, and a USB light you charged eight months ago is probably at twenty percent. If you buy rechargeable, buy one that also takes AAs as a fallback.
The hand-crank question
Crank lights and radios are appealing and mostly disappointing. A minute of hard cranking typically buys a few minutes of dim light. They are a genuine last resort, not a primary plan.
The one worth having is a crank or solar emergency radio — not for the light, but because it receives NOAA weather broadcasts and will charge a phone slowly. Buy it for the radio and treat the light as a bonus.
Making a lantern out of what you have
Two tricks that work and cost nothing.
Torch into a water bottle. Stand a clear bottle or jug of water on the table and shine a torch up into it from underneath. The water scatters the beam and the whole bottle glows. It turns a directional light into room light, which is the thing you actually need.
Headlamp around a jug. Strap a headlamp around a translucent gallon jug of water, lamp facing in. Same effect, and it stands on its own.
Where to put them
A light in a drawer in the kitchen is useless on the stairs at two in the morning.
- One in the bedside drawer of every bedroom
- One at the top of the stairs and one at the bottom
- One in the kitchen
- One in the car, with the batteries out
- Two in the emergency bin
And the one that costs four dollars and solves the problem more often than anything above: a plug-in rechargeable night light that switches itself on when the power fails. It sits in the hallway socket doing nothing for years, and the moment the lights go out it comes on by itself. Nobody has to find anything in the dark.
