When the Lights Go Out, Which Emergency Gadgets Actually Work?

The most expensive emergency gadget isn't necessarily the one you'll be glad you bought.

Imagine the lights go out halfway through washing up on a November evening. Your hands are wet. The radio has gone quiet. You know there’s a powerful camping lantern somewhere, quite possibly in the loft. There’s also a little torch on the hook by the kitchen door. Which one are you glad you own?

In my video studio I can choose from eight cameras. That gives me plenty of ways to film a lesson, but it also gives me eight opportunities to discover that the battery I wanted is flat. It’s why I’d judge emergency equipment with a practical question. What can I actually do with this, here, tonight, in the state I’ve left it?

For a short evening cut, my first choice would be the familiar torch. Once I could see, I’d want a light I could put down, a way to hear local news and enough charge to contact someone. That’s a useful order in which to judge six very different gadgets.

The first five minutes belong to the torch

Try this while the room is still lit. Pick up your rechargeable torch and switch it on with one hand, without looking at the controls. Can you find a steady, comfortable beam first time? Could somebody else in the house do the same?

A tight, bright beam is handy for finding a house number outdoors. At arm’s length, the bright spot bouncing off a white kitchen drawer can make the rest of the drawer harder to see. Try the lower setting and see whether you can read the small print on a packet. Compare the maker’s run time for that setting with the length of your evening. The maximum brightness and longest run time on the front of the box may describe two different modes.

My vote goes to the torch that lives within reach and leaves my phone free for calls. If the awkward part is holding the torch while helping someone with a coat, try the headtorch you already use for walking. UK government power-cut guidance also favours torches over candles. UK guidance on power cuts

A lantern earns its place when two people need the light

Sit opposite someone at the kitchen table. Give one person a torch and ask both people to read. Every time the beam follows one reader, the other loses their place. Put a diffused LED lantern on the table and try again. That simple exercise tells you more about a lantern’s value than a photograph of it lighting up a tent.

Check where the glare lands when you’re seated. Move the lantern to one side or lower its brightness until you can see the other person’s face comfortably. If you haven’t got one, stand an existing torch securely on its tail and aim it at a pale ceiling. Some rooms give a surprisingly good spread of reflected light. Try that before spending anything.

How much phone charge is inside a 10,000 mAh power bank?

You might reasonably expect a bank marked 10,000 mAh to fill a 5,000 mAh phone twice. The missing detail is the voltage at which each number is measured. Watt-hours (Wh) let us compare the energy. Imagine the following labels and assumptions.

Step	What it means
Bank marked 10,000 mAh at 3.7 V	10 amp-hours × 3.7 volts gives 37 Wh stored when new and full.
Bank delivers 80% of that energy at its USB port	About 30 Wh reaches the port. At 5 V that’s about 6,000 mAh. The change of voltage explains part of the smaller mAh figure. The conversion circuit also uses some energy.
Phone stores 90% of the energy delivered	About 27 Wh ends up in its battery under these illustrative assumptions.
Phone battery marked 5,000 mAh at 3.85 V	A full charge stores roughly 19 Wh. The bank could supply about 1.4 full charges in this example, with the phone idle.

Actual results depend on both devices, their age and what the phone is doing. Watching video during charging spends some of the energy as it arrives. Also check the port markings. A socket used to recharge an older bank may only accept power, and a cable that fits the bank may have the wrong plug for your current phone. Anker’s explanation of rated and usable capacity

Here’s a more useful entry for a household notebook than “10,000 mAh”. Start with a partly discharged phone, note its percentage, plug in your usual cable and leave the screen off for half an hour. Record the change. You’ve now answered a question that matters on a dark evening. Will the bank and cable you keep together give your phone a worthwhile top-up?

The battery radio has one job. Try it where you’ll use it

A kitchen radio plugged into the wall can sound excellent for years without anyone discovering that its battery compartment is empty. Unplug the radio itself, fit the correct batteries if needed and tune to a local station. Can you hear speech clearly from your usual chair? Can someone else find that station after switching the set off and on?

A broadcast receiver can pick up a station without your home broadband or a mobile data connection, provided the station is transmitting and you have reception. An internet-only radio needs a working connection. If your set offers FM and DAB, try both in the room you’ll use and write down the station name and, for FM, the frequency. That scrap of paper is particularly valuable if the presets disappear when you change the batteries. National Grid’s household power-cut advice

What does a minute of winding actually buy?

A hand crank is appealing because you can provide the energy yourself. The important question is what you expect that minute of effort to achieve. In the manual for one Midland ER310 model, the manufacturer gives a figure of up to nine minutes of radio listening for one minute of winding. The speed matters. That’s a useful exchange if you want to catch a local bulletin. It tells you very little about charging a smartphone. Midland ER310 manual, page 7

There’s a trap when demonstrating one of these sets. If it’s already charged, turning the handle and then hearing music proves the radio works. The stored charge could have supplied all the music. When the set next runs low in ordinary use, follow its winding instructions, use a comfortable pace and time how long speech stays audible at your usual volume. Anyone who might rely on the handle should try it. A stiff fold-out crank looks quite different once you’ve asked someone with sore hands to use it.

A portable power station needs a job description

A small power station begins to make sense when you can name what you want to run and for how long. Two numbers matter. Watts (W) tell you how much power the outlet can supply at once. Watt-hours (Wh) tell you how much energy the battery stores. A familiar three-pin socket is no guarantee that a particular appliance will run.

Suppose a station stores 250 Wh and has a 300 W continuous AC output. A 2,000 W kettle exceeds the output limit as soon as you switch it on. A steady 40 W lamp is comfortably within it. If our example station delivers 200 Wh to that lamp after losses, it will run for about five hours. The 200 Wh is an assumption for the calculation. The inverter that produces mains AC consumes power itself, so a very small load can give a poorer result than you’d expect from simple division.

For a phone or compatible USB lamp, try the station’s USB socket with its AC output switched off. For a router, remember that powering your own equipment only helps while the upstream broadband service is working. Before buying a station, I’d write down the one thing my torch, radio and power bank couldn’t do. If I couldn’t name it, I’d keep the money.

Six months in a drawer is a different test

Shelf life is how long an unused battery can be stored under the stated conditions. Run time is how long it powers your equipment. Energizer, for example, quotes up to ten years in storage for its UK MAX AA alkaline cells. That tells you something about a dated pack of spare batteries. It doesn’t promise ten years of readiness for an old radio with partly used cells inside. Check the date on the pack and follow the radio maker’s long-storage advice. Energizer UK AA specifications

Rechargeable kit has two clocks ticking. Charge can fall while it sits unused, and the battery’s maximum capacity can decline as it ages. An old torch can say “fully charged” and still fade before you’ve finished supper. Read the maker’s storage and top-up advice, particularly for a larger power station. Put the next check in your diary. If equipment or a rechargeable battery is swollen or visibly damaged, leave it out of the charging test and seek the maker’s disposal advice.

This evening’s challenge: give your equipment a job

Leave the household mains on. Switch off one room light, keep a working light within reach and give yourself twenty minutes.

1. Find your light. From your usual seat, say where the torch lives. Ask someone else to fetch it. A different answer from each of you is a good reason to agree a permanent home for it.

2. Use both hands. Set a lantern or reflected torch beam on the table. Read a label and write down a phone number. Could both people at the table see?

3. Listen and charge. Run the radio on battery and find a local voice. Plug your phone into the power bank. Check that the percentage rises, then leave it connected longer if you want to measure the half-hour result.

4. Write one line per device. Record its job, what happened, and what it needs. “Torch works on low. Charging cable is in the studio. Move it beside the torch” is a perfectly good finding.

5. Finish the job. Charge what needs charging, following the instructions, and put each item back where the household expects it. A brief check proves it starts. Give any light you intend to rely on for a whole evening a longer trial on its normal setting.

The nicest outcome of this experiment would be reaching the end with an empty shopping list. Perhaps the camping lantern is fine, the kitchen radio only needs tuning and the power bank has been waiting for the right cable. On a wet November evening, I’d be glad of the small torch on the kitchen hook for one very ordinary reason. I could put my hand on it, press once and see what I was doing. Before you buy anything for the next power cut, give the equipment you already own one evening to prove itself.