Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
This post is mostly for my friends in NY who got stuck without any lighting other than their MagLites and a handful of batteries.While some light is better than no light, you can do a lot better, for little money, than brushing your teeth with one hand while holding your flashlight in the bathroom mirror with the other.
The simplest and, done properly, most rugged and safe system would be some LED lights that run off of a 12v battery. I actually have just such a set up in storage. It’s bare-bones simple but it beats the crap outta wearing a headlamp to make a sandwich.
Here’s a simple rig that I keep around – it’s nothing more than a 12v marine battery (115 aH) and a couple of the Goal0 lights. A battery clip-to-cigarette adapter lets me run the light straight from the charged battery. The light is 3 watts at 12v, so that means it draws .25 amp/hour. Some math shows that 115 divided by .25 is 460….so, in theory, this fully charged battery would run this light for 460 hours. But…I’m a cautious guy…I don’t discharge batteries more than 50% so, really, its 230 hours…or almost ten solid days of light. (or almost a month of 8-hour usage.)
The Goal0 lights are better described in this post. Two very nice features, other than the low draw of power, is that they can be daisy-chained together. Each light has a socket on top that lets another let be plugged into it. Here’s two of them daisy-chained together and plugged in.
Each light has about nine feet of cord so you can stretch string of lights along the length of a house or whatever. Each light also has a hook to allow you to hang it from whatever nearby object is suitable.
The box in the background, by the way, is an old (pre-Y2K) ConSci PPP ‘battery in a box’ that I bought many years ago. It’s basically a couple 6v batteries and a charge controller mounted in a .50 ammo can. It gives me a small amount of electrical power in a waterproof container that can run lights, radios, etc. They apparently don’t make them anymore but you can easily engineer one on your own with a trip to Radio Shack and Home Depot.
Enough space for a small inverter, spare fuses and 12v accessories. But…you can build a better one.
If you’re an instant gratification guy like me, you can just buy one of those battery-jump-booster things you see at CostCo and Home Depot. Theyre pretty much the same thing but with more capacity. Keep it charged up and you’d have at least a couple days worth of lights. Buy a 12v-to-USB car charger and you could also charge your toys off of it.
Goal0, by the way, makes an all-in-one package for this sort of thing. It’s a battery, light, and panel to charge the battery.(Goal Zero Escape Combo Pack
Realistically, though…you can do this on the cheap for emergency use. Get the battery clips, get the lights, and go scavenge some car batteries out of all those flooded cars out there. Or just spend the $50 and buy the marine battery/battery-booster and a charger.
Out the door you’d be looking at about $100 for the light and a battery that when charged would run that one light for, oh, about a month….which probably seems like a smoking bargain at the moment.
