‘This is another installment of my series of articles on how to light up our lives in TEOTWAWKIville. This article covers the results of my week-long experience testing my lighting preps.
I expected this preps test to be a fairly simple but, as always, it proved to be more useful and eye-opening than I would have guessed. As with other tests I’ve done, it showed where my preps were insufficient, but more importantly, I learned several things I hadn’t even considered with respect to lighting and therefore hadn’t even thought about preparing for. Another testimony to the importance of testing all our preps over a realistic time period, not just for a few hours.
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During this week-long test of my lighting, it was quickly evident I needed to upgrade most of my lights to be ready for a long-term grid-down situation. One of the things I hadn’t considered, light temperature, turned out to be so important I was online ordering replacements during the first 24 hours.
See my April, 2025 SurvivalBlog article: Post-SHTF Lighting(Part 1,Part 2,Part 3)
I hope the point was clearly made in that article that while candles and oil lamps might be sufficient for a three-day power outage, they’renotviable choices for long-term grid-down lighting. Individually, a candle only puts out enough light intensity to read a book from two feet away. Because you’d need to burn several candles at a time to be useful, the math shows you’d literally need more than a pallet of candles costing thousands of dollars to get through a full year of post-SHTF life with just a bare minimum of adequate light.
Oil lamps worked for our ancestors only because there was always a mercantile up the road where they could buy more oil when needed. In a TEOTWAWKI lifestyle, oil lamps aren’t feasible due to the amount of oil (two 55-gallon drums = 4.8 oz./day) which would have to be stored in our preps to provide a year’s worth of minimally adequate light. There’s only so much light produced per drop of oil or ounce of candle wax so the numbers are easy to calculate.
In all likelihood, most preppers are planning on candles or oil lamps due to conventional wisdom. That is what is listed on most prepping lists for providing light, including TEOTWAWKI lists. Too many of us haven’t done the research to explore other options, or done the math to understand just how many candles or much lamp oil or kerosene we’d need to provide a year’s worth of light after the SHTF. It’s also unhealthy breathing petroleum-based fumes on a daily basis.
See my three-part May, 2025 SurvivalBlog article: Post-SHTF Lighting: Portable Power Stations (Part 1,Part 2, andPart 3.) Portable power stations (PPS) were explained and the many options of lighting that can be powered by a PPS were discussed. Part four of this series will cover the basics of how to make a DIY PPS as well as how to repurpose other lights we already have.
The least expensive, least space consuming, healthiest, and highest-quality lighting for a world without electricity is provided using 12-volt DC or 5-volt USB lights, powered by the repurposed 12-volt batteries from our post-SHTF vehicles, charged with a small plug-and-play solar panel. Not only is this option the most practical, but it can also provide enough high-quality light to be almost comparable to what we have today, rather than the minimal amounts candles and oil provide. For serious preppers, a PPS is the best choice to provide light. If we lack DC lights after the SHTF, we can repurpose the many different ones from our vehicles: dome lights, headlights, tail lights, visor lights, etc.
Source: SGT Report
