Several Things

Today:
More on CFL Bulbs - almost house fire!
Quality LED Flashlights
Emergency Preparedness Forms
Winter Prep
Scanner Emergency Warnings

I received this from Scott, W7OXZ.

More CFL ammunition, This was on a bog complaining about LED lamp quality problems.
From http://www.edn.com/blog/, an electronics industry magazine web site.

cgqnw commented:

CFL almost burned my house down. I have a table lamp that we leave on all the time. Base down in a heated room. No moisture. We came home from a short trip to find the fixture melted and black. The lamp shade was a pile of carbon dust except for a few shreds on the wire bracket. We were just really lucky that the fire did not get to the drapes 4 feet away. I have never heard of an incandescent 60 watt bulb burning a house down. Also, very little polution or energy used in manufacturing and they do not fade the furniture or pictures. I am sure that with all of the manufacturing energy and polution in all of the parts assembled for LED or CFL lighting that you will never come close to becoming green....Stay green and buy incandescent bulbs. I have several hundred that I have put away, and they were all made in the USA.

I've got to do some research to find out why he referred to "no moisture". I have now found several sources that say to NEVER leave a CFL bulb in a socket that is on a timer. If the bulb burns out and the timer puts power to the CFL bulb, fire is the most common result.

Also, if you are in a room and a CFL burns out, you are advised to turn the switch off immediately to prevent a CFL fire. Never had that problem with incandescent bulbs, did we?
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Quality LED Flashlights

The free flashlights from Harbor Tools are nice, but not super bright. Commercial flashlights are a different story. I have several that were sold by www.Brinkmann.net. These babies are BRIGHT. Of course, the lower intensity Harbor Freight freebies will make your battery last longer whereas the super bright ones will run your batteries down faster.
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Emergency Preparedness Forms

You can get some great Emergency Prep forms at the following web site:
http://erclindon.org
Some great stuff there.
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Winter Prep

I don't think that there can be any doubt that winter has arrived. If you have not already done so, this would be a good time to place candles, a blanket, and either led flashlights or cyalume light sticks (or both) in your cars.

We've already had some power outages. Do you have LED flashlights sprinkled around your house and office for such emergencies? One member of this net told me that he has LED flashlights located at every place in the house where he EVER sits down and also by the bed. Same in our house. In our house, when we are sitting down or in bed, we are no more than than 2 feet from an LED flashlight.
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Scanner Emergency Warnings

If you have a modern scanner radio, check to see if it has a SAME option in its Weather Scan features. If so, the scanner can be set to stay silent until NOAA issues an extreme weather alert (at 1050 Hz tone) and then the scanner comes alive and you can hear the warning. Many farmers use this feature to give them a head start when bad weather is on its way in.

You can also set the SAME feature to stay in the background while you scan other frequencies such as ham radio, law enforcement, etc. Once the Hazardous Weather alert is received, the scanner ignores normal scans and switches to playing only the severe weather alert.

Look online for the manual for the Uniden BC-246T scanner for an example of this type of feature. Others also have this. You can Google weather SAME alert for more info on this handy feature.
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That's it for this week. 73's de N7OZH.