Two more families report about No Electric Lights

These two families did the "No Electric Lights/No Powered Entertainment" challenge and reported on it:






"We enjoyed the challenge.  My daughter was devastated that she couldn't sleep with her night light, but she survived.  We lit three candles for usage at night.  It was difficult to read by candlelight, so we used a flashlight for a bit.  I found the evening much more relaxing than usual maybe due to the fact that I couldn't see all the messes around the house!  I think I could get used to evenings without electricity :-)  - L.H."

"Hi Amy,

Our family did the challenge Sunday night. We used mostly candles and a few flashlights. We have two small, battery-operated lanterns, but they take 4 D batteries each and don't provide the best light. We did not use them because of their past performance and because we didn't have any D batteries.

To begin with, we kept our blinds open as long as possible to use the sunlight until it was gone. Then we turned to the candles when we started to have a hard time seeing well.

We have 6 100-hour candles that we bought from Emergency Essentials years ago for hurricane season. They don't provide the biggest flame, but what we like is that they have a clear base (where the liquid fuel is) that actually acts like a lantern. We also used 8 tea lights. We lit the candles about 6 and blew them out around 10. We used the candles for cooking dinner, eating dinner, reading scriptures, and getting ready for bed.

We also had 3 battery-operated flashlights. They were LED, I believe. We found it worked best to point them toward the ceiling, whch then reflected their light to a larger area. One daughter actually used our brightest flashlight pointed towards her ceiling fan light (which was frosted glass) and two candles to light her room enough to do homework.

The candles worked really well in the bathrooms, where the light reflected off the mirrors lit the rooms very well.

As we reflected back on our experience, the idea of having the solar-powered Christmas lights to wrap around our light fixtures to provide light from above was one thing we would like to have tried. Also, maybe having a better lantern would have been nice, too, but we made it through the evening just fine with the candles and occasional flashlight use.

Thanks for the challenge!

-W.H."

And a little more from W.H.

"I wanted to make a few more comments about the challenge that I forgot to mention. We do not like using scented candles in this type of situation. The unscented kind are the best. Also, we read scriptures and then read stories by candle light for entertainment. Before it got dark, I played board games with our youngest (since it is no media week for the youth). It was a fun night."