S.H.T.F. Equipment Report - Garrity KP043G LED Dynamo-Lantern

As expected from my last Ammo Alert, I made a trip to my local Bi-Mart store to get some ammo and a few other items.

This $29.99 Garrity lantern was one of the other items. It has 15 smallish white LEDs in it, but can run on 9 of them to conserve energy. It is powered by AA rechargeable NiMH cells. It is self powered in that it incorporates a built in, hand-cranked dynamo to recharge the batteries, as one of three recharging methods. The others are AC adaptor and 12 VDC power cord (included). There is a DC output suitable for charging small equipment such as a cell phone from the unit's battery.

Here is the recharge time schedule:

You will note that it takes roughly 1 minute of cranking to give you 2 minutes as you get into topping up the battery. Maybe Chris Byrne can help me out here (he's an EE), but I suspect that the curve for recharging is not linear, so that it falls off rather badly as you get more power into the battery. My experience (no science, just experience here) is that ALL storage batteries are like this, and it has something to do with the voltage differential between a discharged battery vs. the charging voltage, and as the battery charges, and the voltage spread reduces, the time to a full charge gets longer and longer per turn of the crank. No matter, you will probably recharge this lantern in one of the other ways.

It looks like this in the original packaging:

It looks like this lit up, but it had a weak charge in it then:

It wasn't exactly overwhelming the 9 60-watt CFLs in my kitchen ceiling, but after 2/3 of a full charge, I am blogging by it now. I can read clearly with the lamp 3 feet away and above me (on full power). The diffuser seems to do a good job of dispersing light, unlike an earlier 30-LED lantern I own which definitely bands it's light output.

I'm naturally curious, so I removed the bottom cover to the battery compartment and inspected the lantern from the inside. The AA cells are not replaceable by the each, but are a unitary, proprietary battery pack. I might acquire another battery pack to have two, or put together one of my own. The NiMH cells in the pack are only 1200 MAH, and I have some 2800 MAH cells I could lash together. There might be an issue with installing higher-capacity  cells, though, in that the dynamo might not be up to hammering them with enough current. Maybe Chris can help out with THAT little EE problem, too.

Overall, the lantern is put together well, but it's far from Mil-Spec. It's very light, weighing about 3/4 pound. It's 10 inches high, and would fit in a 6" cylindrical container with room for packaging. It comes with a generous selection of connectors for it's cell-phone charging set-up. It has charging-in-progress and charging-complete LED indicator lights.

It is not waterproof, and may not even be splashproof, but it fits into a 1-gallon Ziploc bag which will provide that capability for a few centavos.

It comes with a factory-replacement warranty for one year (not good in Mexico).

Two years ago, this type of light was unavailable. They are becoming common today, and since I have trust in the Garrity brand of portable lighting, as good, value-for-the-money medium-duty equipment, I highly recommend this product.

BTW, under the LED array and on top of the battery compartment (accessible though the battery compartment) is a cylindrical void about 2"X4". Since this lantern is light enough to blow over in a strong wind, I recommend putting some weight in this void. In the right tube container, you could get almost 100 rounds of .22 ammo in there (think empty pill bottle of the right dimensions). That would almost double the weight, and end the instability issues. What else you might think to stash in such a compartment will be up to you.