Best flashlights for power outages

This is the only product on the site we recommend without a single performance figure, and the reason is that its performance is not the point. Being switched on and in a known place at the moment the lights go out is the point.

Every household emergency plan fails the same way: the torch is in a drawer in the dark room you cannot cross safely. A socket light removes that step entirely.

Energizer publishes no output figure we could find, and we are not going to invent one. Buy it for the behavior, not for the beam.

Skip this ifyou want one good light rather than several adequate ones. This is a coverage product, not a performance one.

A flashlight in a dark kitchen produces one bright circle and a room full of hard shadow. A 360-degree lantern at a quarter of the output makes the room usable. That is the whole argument for owning one.

IPX7 on an outage light matters because outages and weather arrive together.

Replaceable cells rather than a sealed pack is the correct choice for something that sits in a cupboard for two years between uses.

Skip this ifyou need to walk outside with it. A lantern spreads light everywhere, which is exactly wrong on a dark path.

2.75 hours at 600 lumens from two CR123A cells is a very efficient result — that is roughly 6 watt-hours doing real work rather than being thrown away as heat.

3 m of impact resistance is the highest figure in this roundup. Polymer absorbs a drop that would dent an aluminum body.

119 g with cells installed makes this the lightest full-size duty light here.

Skip this ifyou use a light daily. CR123A primaries are the wrong economics for frequent use; buy a rechargeable instead.

1,100 lumens is enough to light a whole room to a level where you can read and cook, which is the difference between coping with an outage and enduring one.

The USB output is the second reason to own it. In a multi-day outage, the phone is the thing that matters.

Rechargeable rather than replaceable cells is a real trade-off for emergency kit: better in a planned outage, worse if it has been in a cupboard for eighteen months. The red LED is the hedge: 1 lumen for a published 348 hours means a flat-ish pack still gives you two weeks of find-the-stairs light.

Skip this ifit will sit untouched for years. For pure standby, replaceable cells beat a rechargeable pack every time.

SureFire publishes both 8,700 candela and a 187 m beam distance, and the two reconcile: the square root of 8,700 divided by 0.25 is 186.5 m. That makes this the only light on this site outside Streamlight and Maglite whose two beam figures can be checked against each other. It is still well short of the ProTac's 374 m on similar output, because SureFire deliberately builds a wider beam with more usable spill.

Two modes, low then high, with no strobe and no programming. On a light you might need in a hurry, that is a feature.

CR123A primaries hold their charge for a decade on a shelf. For a light that lives in a drawer against the worst night of your life, that matters more than rechargeability.

Skip this ifyou buy on specification. Almost everything here beats it on paper; you are paying for reliability and simplicity instead.

259 m works back to roughly 16,770 candela, about 8.6 candela per lumen — a moderately wide beam that still reaches further than several lights with more output. The candela figure is ours, not ThruNite's.

ThruNite states the 1,950-lumen Turbo lasts 60 seconds. That is the most honest line on the page: most makers quote a headline and leave you to discover the step-down. Treat the working output as whatever High turns out to be, which ThruNite does not publish.

The 3,400 mAh 18650 computes to 12.2 watt-hours, the same store as a Fenix HM65R-T, and it is a standard removable cell rather than a sealed pack. Firefly at 0.5 lumens for 41 days is the figure that earns it a place in an outage kit.

Skip this ifyou want a light that sits in a drawer for a year and still works. A rechargeable cell self-discharges; the Streamlight PolyTac runs on lithium primaries that keep for roughly a decade.

Three alkaline AAA cells hold roughly 3.9 Wh between them at a modest draw. That is comparable to the Swift LT's entire battery, for a couple of dollars, available in any gas station in the country.

The red mode is the feature people end up using most. It preserves night adaptation and does not wake a tent.

350 lumens looks modest next to a 3,000-lumen listing. On a footpath at walking pace it is more light than you need, and it will still be running when the 3,000-lumen light has stepped down twice.

Skip this ifyou want one lamp for everything including work. There is no real flood mode and no high-CRI option.

IPX7 on AAA cells is the specification that makes this interesting. Almost everything else in the AAA class is IPX4, which means rain and nothing more.

Three lithium AAA cells hold roughly 4.5 Wh and shrug off cold in a way alkalines do not. On this lamp that combination is worth more than another 500 lumens.

Princeton Tec publishes an output and a runtime for each of its four modes, plus an 85 m beam distance and a 92 g weight - not a single flattering maximum. The 85 m works back to about 1,806 candela, or 3.3 candela per lumen, which says the 550 lumens buys width rather than reach.

Skip this ifweight is your constraint. The AAA carriage that makes it robust also makes it bigger than the Li-ion competition.