I guess most of us woodland owners/users have need of torches, and wind-up torches have the advantage of not running our of power. However, they have two weaknesses that have frustrated me for some time:
1. They're not often very bright.
2. They use internal rechargeable batteries, which have a limited life and need to be charged regularly to prevent them failing prematurely.
Recently I discovered there's a manufacturer making wind-up torches that use ultra-capacitors instead of batteries to hold the charge. Without getting into technical detail, the important point is that ultra-capacitors are not damaged by being left discharged, and can be charged over 100,000 times - compare this to only 1,000 times for a normal rechargeable battery. This means they are ideal for situations like:
- a torch left stored at the wood, where it might be left unused for months but needs to operational when you need it.
- a torch left in the car, again forgotten about for months until you really need it.
- a torch stored in an emergency-preparedness kit at home.
These are all situations where you might find a normal wind-up torch has suffered battery failure just when you need it most.
The torch is the LightStorm CL1, made by Applied Innotech (a US company). There was nobody selling them in the UK, so I've imported a box of them, and I'm selling them on ebay. They're £23.99 incl P&P there, or you can buy them direct from me via our blog for £22.99. I realise you can buy the cheap wind-up torches for £5 or less, but the CL1 torch is a much more rugged product, and won't let you down when it counts. It actually comes with a 5-year warranty, and I think it will last longer than that.
Anyway, you can ready about it and find links to buy direct or via ebay on our blog:
http://peplers.blogspot.com/p/lightstorm-cl1-wind-up-torch.html
Mike