Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Stopped by to visit with a fella the other day and saw a little project of his sitting on his workbench. He had a light fixture hooked up to a 12v battery, just sitting there. I asked him what he was doing. He said that he’d found a place selling 12v bulbs that worked in regular light bulb sockets, so he was seeing how long a charged battery would run the light. As he went about his day he would make a note on the hang tag that was attached to the light noting the time and how much time had elapsed. I commented that I really liked his approach but that it might be better served with an LED light to increase run time, and a light meter so he could monitor the actual decrease of light as time went by. He said he didn’t like the light LED bulbs gave off so he was sticking with the incandescent (which, I gotta say, would not be my first choice if Im counting on running on battery power) and that while I was probably right about getting a metric using a light meter, he just went with what his eyeballs told him was ‘usable light’.

Gotta admire someone that goes past the theory and grabs at a little empirical data for their own edification. I need to do more stuff like that.