Lighting and Power: Lanterns, Headlamps and Batteries

Lanterns are for staying still, headlamps are for moving

That distinction is the whole lighting plan. A lantern lights a shared area so several people can cook and eat; a headlamp points wherever you look so you can walk, find things and read. Trying to do one job with the other tool is why people end up cooking in their own shadow or blinding each other across a table.

The standard family setup: one bright lantern hung above the cooking area, one small diffused light per tent, one headlamp per person. That is three types of light and it covers everything.

Read the runtime, not the lumens

Every rechargeable lantern publishes a headline output that it can sustain for a couple of hours, and a low setting it can run for days. Coleman's OneSource lantern publishes 1,000 lumens for two hours, and 50 lumens for up to 100 hours. Goal Zero's Lighthouse 600 publishes 2.5 hours with both sides on high, and 320 hours with one side on low.

You will spend most of an evening on the low setting, so that is the number to compare. Peak brightness is for pitching a tent in the dark and finding something you dropped.

IPX ratings, briefly

The IPX number describes water protection. IPX4 means splash resistant from any direction, which covers rain. IPX7 means immersion to 1 m for 30 minutes. IPX8 means beyond that — Black Diamond specifies at least 1.1 m for 30 minutes for the Spot 400. For anything strapped to your head in weather, or a lantern that lives outside, this is worth more attention than fifty extra lumens.

Watt-hours, and what a camping battery can and cannot do

Portable power stations are rated in watt-hours (capacity) and watts (how fast that energy can come out). For camping, 250 to 300 Wh covers a weekend of phones, lights and a camera: a phone battery holds roughly 15 to 20 Wh, so a 288 Wh station is somewhere around a dozen full charges after conversion losses.

What it cannot do is heat anything. Kettles, coffee makers and heaters draw 1,000 W or more, well past the 300 W output of every station in this size class, and a whole weekend of stored energy would boil roughly one kettle even if the output allowed it. Heat comes from a gas stove.

Rechargeable or replaceable batteries?

Hybrid designs are the pragmatic answer. The Black Diamond Spot 400 and Petzl Actik Core both run on a rechargeable cell or ordinary AAA batteries, which means you charge them normally and can still buy a fix at a gas station. A sealed rechargeable light is lighter and simpler and leaves you with nothing when it is flat.

For long trips away from power, keep one AA-powered lantern in the car that never gets used until it saves an evening.

As everywhere on this site, these are published figures rather than our measurements. We have not run these lights down to compare real runtimes against their claims — see how we research.