Prepper Kit #1 – Providing Your Family with Light

Written by on in Lighting Without Power, Preparing Our House Systems

Have you ever been in a room at night when the power goes out?  I’m sure you have.  If you have had your kids with you when that happened, what was their reaction?  Probably a gasp or a slight cry if they were older or maybe an outright cry if they were younger.  Light brings comfort and warmth.  The lighting of a candle or a lamp or a flashlight when the power went out probably brought peace.  Even if it was only peace in your own soul.

This is the reason we put together a kit to provide light – to bring peace and comfort to ourselves and to those around us.  It doesn’t matter if the reason for the outage is a tornado, another natural disaster, an ice storm, or just a car plowed into a telephone pole and took down a power line.

Putting together kits

When it comes to kits, putting together a lighting kit is a probably the easiest kit to put together.  You probably have a lot of the components throughout your house.  You’re simply going to bring them together in a container and fill in with a few more items that you may not have yet.

We purchased the totes that we have used for our kits at Costco.  There are two different sizes large black twenty-seven gallon totes and smaller clear totes.  Six of the clear totes fit into the larger black ones.  This lets us keep different kits which don’t take up a lot of space separated within one larger container.  This has been a game changer for keeping things organized.

That all being said, because of the size and the bulk of the number of candles that we have, we’ve used a whole black tote as a power outage tote.

Battery powered items

Prepper Kit #1 - Providing Your Family with LightFlashlights

Having different kinds of flashlights help because each type of flashlight has different uses.

  • Cheap Flashlights – We keep small (and cheap) flashlights on hand for the kids – because well, they are kids and they lose things often.
  • Magnetic base flashlights – We keep these on hand because it’s helpful to be able to secure them to something metallic like a ceiling fan which isn’t working.
  • Headlamps – We like having headlamps because if we need to work on something, the light will be consistently pointed at the item that we need to work on and our hands are free.

Electronic tea lights

We love electronic tea lights because when our children were younger, we could put one of these in the kids’ rooms as a nightlight without worrying about someone actually knocking over a candle and starting a fire.  These have saved our sanity (since younger ones had a nightlight for a long time) on more than one occasion.

Lamps and accessories Prepper Kit #1 - Providing Your Family with Light

  • Lamps – We don’t keep these in our lighting kit.  We actually keep these out in our great room, and we have them in all sizes from very small 4″ tall lamps, to several 18″ lamps, to the very large 24″ lamps.  Make sure that you have enough for the areas that you want to have consistent light.
  • Lamp Oil – This is imperative to keep on hand in order to keep your lamps working.  We keep our lamps 3/4 full at any given time so we don’t have to get them ready to roll when the electricity goes out.  We keep at least a gallon of this in the house.
  • Lamp wicks – You need to make sure that your lamp wicks actually match the size that you need for any given lamp.  Your smaller lamps may need 1/4″ wicks.  Medium lamps tend to use 3/8″ or 1/2″ wicks, and larger lamps tend to use 3/4″ or  1″ wicks.

Prepper Kit #1 - Providing Your Family with LightCandles

You probably have each of these types of candles somewhere in your house.  Maybe you have pretty smelling colored candles.  You may have plain-jane, white, unscented candles.  You may even have some more exotic types of candles like floating candles.  I have some suggestions below, but no matter what you have, gather the vast majority of them in one place so that you have them with the rest of your lighting tote when a power outage strikes.

  • Taper or pillar candles
  • Tealights
  • Votive candles
  • Pint-sized mason jars – the rest of the candles were probably self-explanatory, but why Mason jars?  Because we have kids, we don’t like just putting candles out on a surface.  It’s too easy for the kids to not realize that their clothes or blankets or papers could catch on fire.  So we purchased pint-sized mason jars to contain any and all types of smaller sized candles to minimize the chances of them catching something on fire.

Prepper Kit #1 - Providing Your Family with LightSolar Lighting

  • Luci Lights – We LOVE out Luci lights because they are inflatable – practically indestructible (!! – which is amazing if you have kids as I do), and they are SOLAR so I don’t have to have to electricity to use them.  Triple awesome!
  • Yard solar lights – These are also wonderful, but not quite as indestructible as the Luci lights.  If you keep these in the ground outside, they can be dirty to bring inside, if you keep them in one flower pot outside, they will be perfect and ready to use inside.  Just keep your kids away from them and don’t let them play with them when they are outside.  Yea.  Speaking from experience here.  Kids are WONDERFUL, but not always helpful to keep things in one piece.  Know what I mean?

Lighting Candles / Fire

Want to keep everyone in one room and not run through your lamp oil or candles too quickly?  If you have a fireplace, you could light a fire.  But just like other methods of lighting your house, you’ll have to have the necessary items on hand.

  • Matches – cause you can never have too many matches……..cause if you’re like me, if you use one, you’ll use four Prepper Kit #1 - Providing Your Family with Lightor five.
  • Butane fire starters – These are my favorite.  It makes lighting candles or newspaper (to start a fire) SO VERY SIMPLE!
  • Fire starters – If you have a fireplace and don’t always have an easy time starting a fire, these gems may be just what you need in order get your fire going well!
  • Newspaper – Do you get the Sunday paper – or any other newspaper during the week?  Save a stack of the papers so that you have material to start a fire in case you need light.
  • Wood – Now again, we don’t keep this in our kit, but it is a consideration if you plan on using a fireplace to provide light.

Having these together all in one place has saved our figurative skins on more than one occasion!  It’s so simple to put it together.  You have a lot of this already in your house, don’tcha?  Uhuh.  I thought so.  Just get it all together.  It doesn’t have to be perfect at all.  Just have a shoe box?  Start there!  Only have a few things at home?  No big deal at all.  Gather what you have.  Start where you are, grow from there.  Add 2-3 of these things that you don’t have to your Amazon cart.  Add a couple of others to your grocery list.  Just a few at a time.

What About You?

Do you already have a lighting kit put together?  Are there other items that you think should be included in your kit that I don’t have mentioned here?  Would you share with us so we can all learn?  Leave a comment below and share your knowledge with us.

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