Every home needs multiple sources of emergency light, and since I am always looking for a bargain, I’ve been experimenting with Dollar Store long-burning religious candles.
Emergency Light For $1
You’ve probably seen them in your local grocery store or Dollar Store if you shop at one… religious candles, tall glass candles often with a picture of Jesus, Mary or a patron saint on them. You can often find them in plain glass shells.
Obviously, using one of these candles as a part of your emergency light survival illumination sources is an “off label” use… the candles are designed for religious observances, not power-outage emergency light illumination.
Their religious usage? That’s something we just don’t touch on here at 3BY, we’ll leave that up to you to figure out.
The question we ask is when buying one of these candles to be used as an emergency light “is my dollar well spent”.
Let’s find out.
Plain Or Pretty, Which Is Better?
This is perhaps the easiest question to answer, as a prepper wanting an emergency light.
The candles that have the pretty wrappings with pictures of saints put out A LOT less usable light than the plain, clear candles. It’s not even close.
The clear lights put out two full stops of light more than the ones with religious figures on them.
Stops of light? What? What does this mean?
I’m a photographer, and photographers talk about light variances in “stops”. This has to do with how shutter speeds, apertures and sensitivity are recorded by cameras. Honestly, that’s far beyond the scope of this article, but simply put it means that for each “stop” of light, the amount of light is doubled.
So when a photographer says “it’s two stops more light” it means there is four times more light measurable by a light meter between the two candles.
I measured a white towel under the light, which showed me the amount of light reflected upon the table surface (where, for example, you might have your meal sitting).
The glass lights were a strong two stops more light than the lightest of the decorated candles (Jesus, in a white robe). Not surprisingly, the darker the decoration on the candle, the darker the illumination on the table).
Does adding a reflector help?
As an experiment, I cut open an aluminum pop can (an empty Diet Root Beer can if you are curious) and made a reflector that covered the back half of the candle. I bent back the bottom of the can to reflect light coming out of the top of the candle at 45 degrees.
I’m not really going to go into the details of how I did this because I’m really not sure it is a safe contraption, so I don’t recommend anybody else making one… I was just curious how much (if any) more light would be reflected.
The results? About one more stop of light was reflected onto the table top… so yes, it does make the candle brighter, but it also creates some obvious problems… the contraption contains a LOT of very sharp edges, and it was connected to the candle by duct tape. Were I going to actually use this thing for any length of time, I would attach it to the candle with metal wire.
The contraption also made the candle much more likely to get tipped over, and increasing the risk of catching one’s house on fire is a bad thing.
A much safer alternative to my contraption would be to simply set the candle in front of a mirror so that the light from behind the candle is reflected outward. If one were wanting to make a contraption that would be very, very safe one could build a rack for multiple candles, securing the candles in front of a reflector made of glass or the shiny side of aluminum foil.
How much light do clear votive candles put out?
Compared to modern lighting, not much. One might even say very little. One candle, even with a reflector, does not produce enough light to read by. Spice is not very impressed by the output, at all.
Me? I think for $1 and the ridiculous length of the burn time they have that the candles are a really good emergency light prepping resource. If you put several of them together, in front of a reflective background, you can read by the light.
Having said that, other candles (ones without glass housings) are brighter… if significantly more dangerous to use.
Safety
Any time you have an open flame inside your house, you introduce the risk of fire. The more exposed the flame, the higher risk of fire.
If you burn a candle without any housing, than you are much more likely to catch the surrounding area on fire than if you burn one inside of a housing. Religious candles of the type we are describing are very safe, because it’s difficult to reach the wick without inserting a long, thin item in the mouth of the glass case that holds the candle.
There’s always an uptick in fires when there are power outages and people break out the fire-based lighting and heating, but these candles are as safe as any you are likely to find anywhere.
There are churches that have had at least one of these types of candles burning 24/7 for the last 1400 years without burning the structure down. That’s a lot of candles, but then again they use high quality candles, not the $1 versions, which brings me to…
A Word Of Caution From Reader Uncle George!
One of our readers, Uncle George, left a comment (you can see it below) that’s really good, so I am adding it to the article.
Uncle Georges states “A word of caution: One of the many hats I have worn in my life is fire clean-up. I only did it for a little over a year, but during that time I remediated TWO fires caused by the cheap religious candles. One of them only smudged up the house (almost every room), and the other one apparently exploded and burnt the place up pretty bad. Even burned through a fiberglass bathtub. Since then, I have a rule- don’t buy cheap candles, you never know what you are going to get.”
How long will they burn?
A long time. How long? I honestly don’t know, I’ve never burned one 24/7 and timed it.
Candle life depends on many factors including the quality and size of the wick, the quality of the wax used (beeswax vs paraffin plus grades within the types), etc. Top quality manufactures make 14-day candles that have a expected lifespan of at least 336 hours.
The Dollar Store candles I am talking about? Not top quality. I’ve seen a lot of estimates around the web of a burn-time of somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 hours.
If you apply that 80 hours to an expected daily burn time of 4 hours (people go to bed early when the power is out) that’s 20 days, or to put it in money terms, five cents-per-day. If you burn four of them at a time, that’s a whopping 20 cents-per-day.
Give it a go, but keep in mind what Uncle George warns about…
My advice? Drop by your local Dollar Store and buy a couple of these candles to experiment with for your emergency light inventory. You can’t go too far wrong for the price.
But watch for what Uncle George talks about in the comments below.
A word of caution: One of the many hats I have worn in my life is fire clean-up. I only did it for a little over a year, but during that time I remediated TWO fires caused by the cheap religious candles. One of them only smudged up the house (almost every room), and the other one apparently exploded and burnt the place up pretty bad. Even burned through a fiberglass bathtub. Since then, I have a rule- don’t buy cheap candles, you never know what you are going to get.
Good comment! I’m going to edit the story to add this into the main body, to make sure people see it.