30 August 2011
We lost power in our house because of the Hurricane Irene for 10 hours. In the past, we would not lose power when our friends and neighbors would lose power but this time it was us. I had installed our Mr Beams Power Outage Lighting System anticipating that we might lose power knowing that the storm was coming. The power went out around 3am.
The backup lighting turned on immediately when the outage was detected and I had more than enough light to get around the first and second floors of our house. I pulled the MB220 power outage detector out of the wall and used it as a flashlight. It is very bright and I needed it to be because our security system started beeping every 30 seconds because of the AC failure. I needed to figure out how to shut that off before it woke up our kids - had the kids woken up that would have presented an even bigger problem. It took me a while but I figured out how to turn the beeping off.
So I went back to bed and put the MB220 on my nightstand. A few times it occurred to me to check something in the house. In addition to detecting a power outage and being a bright LED flashlight, the MB220 is also a battery powered remote control for the lights I had installed around the first and second floor. I pushed the ON button from my bedside and the lights turned on. When I got back to bed, I pushed the OFF button and all of the lights turned off. The battery powered lights that were installed around the first and second floor can run for up to 40 hours on one set of batteries so had the outage been longer than 10 hours we would have at least had light on the stairs and in the main areas throughout the outage.