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Whether you're a prepper or just cautious, it's smart to have at least one emergency flashlight, just in case. In case there's an extended power outage, in case you're out in the wilderness on a camping trip and your regular flashlight dies, or even in your car when there are no other sources of illumination. But batteries have a way of being dead when you most need them. Enter the American Red Cross / Eton CLIPRAY Hand-Crank Emergency Flashlight.
But does it work? Tech expert Dave Taylor of https://www.AskDaveTaylor.com/ checked one out and found that while it's quite acceptable as a flashlight, the 'charge your phone too' feature is worthless. Watch and learn why...
Check it on Amazon too: https://amzn.to/2H2byzr
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0:00
A crank flashlight? You'll never be without light. Let's check it out
0:11
Dave Taylor here and I'm kind of sitting in the dark sort of to make a point is that we never know when we're going to lose power
0:17
And yeah, you might have your flashlight sitting in your drawer or something. But here's the thing. Batteries run out. And if you lose power and it's for a while and you don't have batteries, it gets to be a drag
0:29
You get to use candles or lanterns or you just sit in the dark, right
0:33
Eventually, I suppose, post-apocalypse, we're all going to end up using that sort of agrarian sleep cycle
0:39
If it's sunset, let's go to bed. At sunrise, let's get up. I would rather have a flashlight
0:44
So that's what this is. This is the Red Cross crank, what are they called this
0:49
The clip ray, self-powered hand-crank flashlight. And it comes in this crazy anti-theft packaging
0:56
So I thought we could do sort of an unboxing, unpacking. and then give it some tests. So I am going to use my handy scissors and hopefully not cut the
1:07
Bejesus out of my hands. We won't actually go too far down that. I have dealt with these before and of course the whole idea of this packaging is that
1:15
if someone picks this up at a store they can't just pop it open and slip the flashlight into their bag now
1:21
it's a $10 item. So I don't imagine there's a huge amount of theft revolving around it, but who knows now? There's the crank on the
1:29
back and you can see the bulbs for the flashlight. Let's just turn it on. Hey, look at that
1:34
It comes charged. That's cool. Now, one of the interesting things about this, oops, I'm not sure
1:39
that was supposed to come off. I guess it did come off is that it has a USB port on the side. So let's
1:44
turn the flashlight off. And the USB port is supposed to let you charge some phones, not all phones
1:50
because a lot of phones require a fair amount of energy But let find out This is the Samsung Galaxy S8 and let plug this in and see if the phone sees any power
2:04
I am not seeing that it's seeing any power from that line, but I'm not sure
2:09
Maybe we have to turn, I can't imagine, but maybe we turn the flashlight on, and now it starts charging
2:14
The whole phone's actually just starting up, so, you know, I'll have to give it just a couple
2:20
seconds for this test to be valid. Meanwhile, I will tell you that what the American Red Cross
2:27
the company Eaton, that actually makes this product, what they say is that if you're cranking this
2:33
let's see, if you're cranking this to a second, and every 60 seconds of cranking, and there's a fair
2:40
resistance here, every 60 seconds of cranking should give you 10 minutes of flashlight usage
2:46
It's a little whiny, but whatever. If it's this or be sitting in the dark and not, you know
2:52
or be out, you know, far from your campsite and your flashlight's dead
2:56
If this is what I have to do so I can get light to find my campsite again
3:01
totally worth it, right? Now, let's see. So here we are with my phone
3:06
I've just given it even more charge. And this is definitely not seeing any sort of power coming off of that USB connection
3:14
And that's what I've seen from other people. people when I've read other people's reviews. It's like this works as a flashlight and you can see
3:20
it's a three LED flashlight so it's pretty bright actually and if indeed it is 10 minutes for
3:27
every 60 seconds of cranking, that's not too bad and frankly if you have kids you say here crank this
3:33
for five minutes and we'll have an hour of flashlight. Now the problem with that, one of the problems
3:38
is that there's no indicator of where the battery charge is. So I really wish there was something that
3:44
would show you that you have charged to 100 You have charged it to 50 It is down to 1 and you about to run out of power and you about to run out of light There no way to know how charged it is
3:57
Now, it is a very budget unit. So maybe, you know, I just need to go to the next level up
4:04
But this seems like something where they could have had some indicator. Maybe a couple of LEDs on the side that would show you battery status if you pushed a button or something
4:12
I mean, gosh, plenty of other devices seem to manage that circuit. tree, right? So I will say the phone charging feature did not seem to work very well for this
4:23
phone. Apparently different phones, it works differently. The company says that like the iPhone 3 and
4:30
iPhone 4 just doesn't work at all. But if I can't get the Samsung to see any power, I'm not sure why I
4:35
would believe any other phone's going to do that. Then again, that is something where on the front
4:41
they literally don't even mention it on the front of the package. There's just one icon on the
4:46
the back that suggests that there's this USB thing on the side. So I don't know, maybe that's not
4:51
that a big a deal that it doesn't actually work. So you can decide for yourself. Now, one thing I do
4:57
like is it actually has, it's a nice build quality. It's not very heavy and it's pretty solid
5:03
plastic. And they have a carabiner on the side. I'm going to figure out how to get it to work
5:09
Let's see. Oh, there we go. So that is great because you can hook it onto things like, for example
5:16
backpacking or onto the loop of your belt when you are trying to evade zombies and you keep
5:21
your flashlight off and then you turn it on so you can get to that safe spot because zombies
5:27
apparently are really not very smart and they can't see light. How do they mostly work? Like
5:33
the Walking Dead? It's like smell, right? Hmm. Ew. So I guess if you smell like rotting flesh
5:40
you are in the clear Just don come visit me because that be really gross But still nonetheless kind of fun So it is a crank flashlight simple easy to work with
5:51
You crank it, you get battery power, you use that as a flashlight
5:56
You can experiment with the USB port and try to charge something. I would say have another solution, like maybe some sort of solar phone charger
6:04
That's a really elegant solution, although if you're trapped in the basement, that's not going to work very well
6:10
So it goes. Now, before I tell you the price, and it's really pretty painlessly priced
6:15
But before I get there, let me ask, if you can subscribe to my channel, I need to turn the lights on
6:20
I need to be able to survive the zombie apocalypse. Just subscribe
6:24
Just click the button, and then you'll be able to catch all my other videos. Super handy
6:28
Now, this is the American Red Cross clip ray self-powered hand-crank flashlight, and it's 1499 at Amazon.com
6:38
But when I just checked, it actually was down to $999 at Amazon.com
6:45
Now, there are a ton of hand crank flashlights on the site and certainly available through different channels
6:51
So you might want to do a little bit of homework and look at what your options are, but this is actually a pretty decent and simple solution
6:58
Are there other things I wish it did? Yeah, you know, would it be nice if it could charge your phone an emergency
7:03
Yeah. But just as a flashlight that I can leave in a drawer and in a real crisis situation
7:08
when there's just nothing and I don't have any batteries or my batteries have all been depleted
7:13
this is a whole lot better than sitting in the dark so with that I will catch you in my next video