I’m sure you’ve all seen the emergency crayons light idea floating over Pinterest and Facebook at some point. We decided to test it out during one of our Preparedness Friday classes, and give you an idea of how it worked for us – and if it’s something you’d even want to do for you!
Instead, we should have just broken off the tip to get to the paper, but we didn’t. And it took a long while to finally get it to the point of lighting. (oh,..how much science we learned at this point!
Cool fact: Did you know that the ‘smoke’ coming off a blown out candle isn’t really smoke, but actually wax vapor cooling? seriously.
Do you really want to make emergency lighting from crayons?
Here’s the point when we began to say..hm…do we really want this? The flame continued to get bigger and more out of control the longer it burned down the length of the candle. Now, had I thought about it, I might have run to get the hurricane lamp glass to put over this to see if it helped. But I didn’t. Would it have helped? Probably, but it wouldn’t necessarily have been any more stable.
The single crayon did actually throw off a lot of light in our room when we turned off the lights and shut the curtains. But I didn’t feel safe with it at all.
Now..the other issue is..bundling a few of these together, lighting them and using them as a torch. It could work for short term. However, you’d have hot wax melting everywhere, including on your fingers. Not necessarily something I’d want to do, but if I was caught, alone, with no provisions in a preschool classroom, grabbing a bunch of crayons for some lighting might be the thing to do. Just use the safety scissors to cut off the tips to save yourself some time, and hope that the teacher smokes and had a lighter or matches tucked up in her desk somewhere to use to light them. 🙂
After our experience, this is not something we’d want to rely on, nor will it be something we throw into our preps as a tool. We do happen to have a box of crayons and a small coloring book for someone in our secondary emergency box that we’d grab if we have time or room that has some gear that would be awesome to have but that is not necessary. Then we’d have a back up. But I don’t feel this is a safe way to light up a room at all.
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Who knew that wasn’t smoke? Don’t ya love the science behind it all 😀
I’ve got crayons stashed away too. I’m going to test them on my jute twine fire starters. I’ve always used paraffin wax to make these. Great ideas!
I can imagine that this would work in a classroom situation as a last resort. It is something that I have thought about as an emergency measure for my own classroom if there were to be an earthquake or tornado, etc. and we had to stay in place overnight or longer Light would be such a comfort to my kiddos in that scenario. I had the thought to bundle them and use them as a “multi-wick” candle. Thanks for trying it out and publishing the information. Good to know!
just remember after a tornado or earth quake there can be open gass lines ..alwas besure your in a area that wont go boom before lighting and flames.
If not practical for a light source then it would make a good fire starter.
The trick is to use only CRAYOLA brand crayons. I always put a small square of foil around the bottom of the crayon and clip a clothes pin for stabilization. Snip the tip off down to the wax and light the paper as the wick. It will consume the entire crayon with nothing left but a little paper ash when it’s done. I stock up during the “Back to School” sales in August.
I’ll only say that I find the practice unsafe – regardless of what brand you use. It would have to be an absolute emergency to try something like this since.