Solar-powered LEDs got us through the blackout, while Big Energy couldn't

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I'd suggest buying a set of the solar-powered garden lights, even if you never use them in your garden. Tonight they made sitting through an 8.5-hour blackout much easier. I put one in each room and they functioned as night lights, supplying enough light to get around in, if not enough to read by, at least enough to walk around the house without stumbling. All 10 of them lasted for 5 hours or more; 2 of the 10 are still going 7 hours after I brought them in the house.

And, if the blackout were to continue for a second night, I could simply set them out in the sun tomorrow to recharge them for another night. These little lights ($30 for the set of 10) were the best money I spent this year.

Meanwhile, Sempra Energy (parent company of San Diego Gas & Electric) took 8.5 hours to restore power to our neighborhood, and says that some areas of the county will still be without power even on Saturday, more than a full day after it went out. Sempra is a private corporation with a monopoly on delivering electricity to San Diego residents. They have in effect, shut down the 8th largest city in the U.S. for an entire night. (Well almost; the Navy hospital here knows better than to trust Sempra, and has their own tiny power plant.)

To me it's pretty ominous that a privately-owned company can effectively shut down a city and county with 3 million people for a night. The head of SDG&E says on the radio, "Well this is unprecedented" and bla bla bla. But it was going to happen sooner or later and they should have been prepared for this with an alternate method for restoring power even if they had to buy the power from somewhere else. Having a monopoly on a service should carry with it the responsibility to deliver the service continuously.

[greenman3610]

1. great marketing idea

for makers of such gadgets to construct them so they can easily be picked up and taken inside for emergency lighting.

[hobbit709]

2. I've got an emergency unit the size of a Coleman lantern.

Hand crank generator, LED lights, emergency flasher, siren, AM-FM-Weather band radio, and cell phone charger.
5 minutes of cranking gives you enough light to read by for about an hour.

Bought it on sale about 10 years ago for $15.

[sfpcjock]

3. How long is it going to take a flunkie in Yuma to grab the wrong end of the resistor again?

A couple of years, if we're lucky. They don't prepare as well as they should, and the infrastructure is less reliant and stretched to the breaking point. A few more hot days or months as they had in Texas, and it will be repeated.

Once there is a trip in the system the voltage starts to dive and can fry anything attached to such a huge load. So when that happened, San Onofre had to go offline. That one event droped 2.2 Megawatts offline and everybody south of Newport went down. That's what the SDGE guy said.

[begin_within]

6. Now that it's known how easily an entire city can be taken down,

What's to stop a prankster, terrorist, or - I shudder at the thought of it, but I have to say it: a corporation from holding the whole city hostage, or conducting a heist similar to that in "Ocean's 11" where they created a power outage so they could do the deed?

[hlthe2b]

4. I love solar LED products for the emergency kit......

I bought two of the new LED flashlights that can be recharged by solar or batteries and with incredible shelf life on both (years). They hold their charge.

I also bought one of those small mechanical crank/solar/battery/AC/DC powered radios that also has an LED light AND a USB port to power a cell phone. With AM/FM and 3 NOAA weather bands in a small form factor that is nearly half as small as the one I bought years ago and lightweight enough to go in that 72 hour emergency pack that few of us probably have ever put together (I have only officially done so, recently).

But, yes, LED solar... A great combination. And, the garden lights are a nice idea to supplement the light in a black out. Kudos on you for thinking of it.

Given the weather, natural disaster and blackout related emergencies across the country in recent months, I think many have it on their minds as to what they need to put together for emergencies. Do it now!

[ixion]

5. Energy Independence via distributed energy systems

is the way to go! :patriot:

[pipi_k]

7. There was a thread on this a few days ago...great idea...

I have a whole yard full of those things and it never occurred to me to bring them in during outages.

Anyway, I got a couple for the house, then I saw something called "Lid Lights" (about $10 each on eBay)

They're basically jar lids with the solar panel things in them, run on one AAA rechargeable battery each. I put them on some little glass canning jars I have here. The 4 ounce jam-sized ones with faceted sides.

They are the cutest things!

Presumably the lids can even go on the larger mason jars with the same size openings at the top, and then filled (not to the top) with little trinkets to make a pretty night light gift.

I haven't tried it, but I guess if you had a plastic jar the same size (mayonnaise, whatever) you could make an unbreakable night light for an older kid.

Anyway, for years we used candles and oil-filled hurricane lamps and even those little bend-it-in-the-middle fluorescent light tubes when the lights went off. No more. Solar is the way to go! :)

[begin_within]

8. If I was building a new house now, I'd have a skylight in each room,

with half of the skylight a regular 'dome' type skylight and the other half of it an LED array, with solar cells on the top and an arrangement of LEDs on the underside. A mixture of colors to blend into a more natural "warm" light. The garden lights I used last night had a cold white look. Then have that be the main lighting at night, with additional solar panels and a storage battery to power appliances.

[Uncle Joe]

9. Kicked and recommended for a good tip.

Thanks for the thread, begin_within.