DIY Emergency Lantern

Many households now days have a container of hand wipes that once empty they will make their way to your city recycling sorting facility and hopefully end up recycled into new products, but just creating other items from this post-consumer product takes a huge amount of energy. So I ended up making an emergency lantern out of one of this containers . This lantern not only is it inexpensive, but you can repair it since most of the items are found in your local hardware store or online.This is just the basic idea of an emergency lantern running out of 4 AA batteries,and the improvement that can be made are endless. You can make it run with lithium batteries( please be careful when using li-ion batteries) .

1 recycled wet wipe container

1 Barrier Terminal Blocks 2P CH2

1 4 AA Battery Holder with wires

1 Voltage Regulator DC 5V-11V Step Up to 12V

1 Rocker Switch with pre soldered wires

1 2 part epoxy

2 Feet of DC12V 1.5W 3 Chips LED Module

4 AA batteries

1 Permanent marker

1 Utility knife

1 roll of electrical tape(Optional)

2 neodimium magnets ( Optional)

2 bottle caps (Optional)

We remove the label fro the container.Then we decide to where the switch will be located. You can use a marker or use a piece of electrical tape to see where you will make the hole where the switch will be mounted.

Remember to measure the lower part of the rocker switch and do a same size template outlined with the marker or with a peace of electrical tape.

We mix a small amount of two part epoxy and apply at the edge of the hole where the switch will sit.

Each module has a peel adhesive backing which we remove and space them evenly.

A two position terminal block is installed on one end of the led strip

Installation of the step up converter is done taking care of polarity, in the output side of the converter is where we install the led modules together with the two segment terminal block.

Strip both ends of the switch wires with the wire stripper and install a two segment terminal block that will hook between the positive coming from the battery holder and the positive coming from the converter.We then cut out a one position of terminal block.We use that single terminal block to hook up together the negative wire coming from the battery holder and the negative from the converter.

At the bottom of the container we glue down the neodymium magnets making sure to determine which sides you will be gluing. On top of those magnets we glue a bottle cap. We double check that the wiring is done like in the drawing. Finally, we install the batteries, we put the voltage regulator at the bottom of the container and the battery holder and we switch the lantern.