Customer Reviews

Duracell Garrity Rechargeable LED Flashlight with Night Light

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I purchased this Garrity Rechargeable LED Flashlight with Night Light because it seems to offer all the features I'm looking for:
- As an emergency lamp that turns on automatically during power failure
- As a rechargeable LED flashlight
- As a night light with automatic light-sensor switch.

Upon testing this unit, however, I'm shocked to discover that it is using a 4W incandescent bulb as night light. Who in the world designed it that way? By using an incandescent bulb, it is simply wasting energy and also heating up the unit. Granted that, it is 'only' using 4W in night light mode. But by switching to a LED night light, the power consumption can be reduced to under 1W. Using an incandescent bulb also makes the unit unnecessarily bulky, since more than half of its front panel is occupied by the light bulb.

As a LED flashlight, it uses three rechargeable AAA NiMH cells to power a 5mm LED. The LED consumes about 60mA initially on a set of freshly charged batteries, but the current drops lower as the batteries are used up. So a set of fully charged 600mAh batteries can power the LED for at least 12 hours.

The best part of this LED flashlight is that: those rechargeable cells are user-replaceable. This is important since rechargeable batteries inevitably fail after a few years. Also in case the power outage lasts more than 12 hours, you can even swap in alkaline AAA cells to power this flashlight.

If you can overlook the incandescent night light (or just remove the bulb), then this unit makes a reasonable power-failure lamp and flashlight. But the Energizer Weather Ready Compact Rechargeable LED Light may be a better choice, because it is smaller and less expensive.

Have now had two of these for a few months. Yes, it would be nice to be able to turn off the night light feature, but overall it is a fine product. We looked at many other models in local stores before finding this on the Internet. Most used NiCd batteries and/or had batteries that were not replaceable. Some manufacturers did not even state what kind of batteries their product contained, and did not give any estimate of how much time the light could give when the power was out. Our power was out several times this winter. These lights served us well. We don't know how long they might have lasted because our power was back on each time within 2-4 hours.