Wow! two months for a 'special order' lantern?

I might have missed it, but does anyone else have the Solar powered yard lights? I have a bunch, they have replaceable aa nicad batteries and are great for use as 'torches' at night, and if there is light in the day, they just sit there and recharge. I just saw an 8-pack of them over at Home Despot for $25 and grabbed them - the price keeps going down and the yard can always use more evening illumination anyway.

Rena

I found a battery operated "lantern" at a discount store. Since it was about $10.00, I decided that it was worth a try. It turned out to be so good that I bought a second one for this house and sent several off to family members living in hurricane prone areas.

The lantern is made by Qualstar, and uses 4 D cell batteries. What I really like about it is that you can easily read by its white light.

One family member used hers when they lost electric power for more than a week (hurricane), and she loved it for the same reason I do.

Candles and (Dietz) oil lanterns can help you to see how to get around, but they don't always make reading and close-up work easy.

We must own several billion flashlights (give or take), but it seems that we always have to search for them when we have a sudden need for one. <img src="/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

Just flashlights and candles for me. Nothing fancy. I'm pretty comfortable in the dark. Rarely carry much of a light when camping, hunting or doing other "normal" activities that put me out in the darkness so when the power goes out it's really not that big of a deal. I don't require "comfort" lighting... just a little light for when I reall need to see something well, so flashlights and candles seem to be more than enough. I have been through a 10 day blackout with nothing more than that with no problems. Sometimes I think it would be cool to have an ultra-bright lantern. Maybe the battery operated cousin to the old Coleman eye-blinding camping lanterns. But then I figure I would never use it and spend the money on something else. <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

I fly electric-powered model airplanes, so I've got a large gel-cell battery that I use for field-charging the flight batteries. It's always in my shop on a float charger. It seems like that would be a great source for powering emergency lighting. Anybody know of any 12-volt lamps that would be good to have around to hook up to that?

Easiest thing to do would be to hook up the dome light from your car to that gel cell in an emergency...free, and easy.

Hooking anything else up would require some form of voltage converter...an LED would require a zener diode, and a current limiting resistor, but would practically run forever off of a typical 12V 7.2 AH gel-cell...

Benton, you might want to try one of the 12v flouresents, on a battery it will run quite a while and put out a lot of light. The one i have in the truck is a no name that came from one of the big box stores. Keep one in your truck for use as a trouble light.

There's no shortage of lighting or appliances for 12-volt systems, they're widely marketed for RVs, boats, and even cabins. You can probably find anything you need at an RV store or marina near you, but if you want to get really ambitious:

http://www.realgoods.com/

I didn't think of RVs, that's a great idea.