Off-Grid Lantern – Petromax HK500

Prepared for eventualities

I’ve got to confess that I’m a bit of a “prepper”. I’ve always had some sort of a “bug-out bag” stowed away in a dusty corner. And sufficient dried and canned food for at least a week. Plus the means to cook it. The reports in 2022 about the shortage of natural gas in Germany, which heats my flat, have forced me to look at my somewhat half-hearted preparations in a new light. After some deliberation, I’ve ordered some additional items for my BOB. And I’ve indulged in buying a rather large and unwieldy lantern. I’ve got fond memories of this type of light from my youth, so it took very little to allow me to indulge. While several manufacturers make lanterns like this, including the ubiquitous Coleman, I opted to get the gold standard and acquired an original Petromax HK-500 lantern.

Deceptive modern design

In today’s digital world this old-school petroleum lamp looks like an unnecessarily complicate archaic piece of ancient history. It has no electronics, uses liquid fuel, has a lever and a little hand-pump. It looks (and is) not trivial to start. But despite looking like a fragile antique, it is actually quite high-tech and very robust. It lies at peak of many years of technological innovation.

Let there be light!

The creation of light has thousands of years of history, from the original discovery of fire to making oil and wax lamps for portable illumination. Old tallow and wax and oil lamps have helped dispel the night for millennia but now we’ve got better and more efficient methods of providing illumination.

While the storm lantern is an awesome and robust tool, it isn’t as efficient as a mantle lantern in lighting up the night. The modern mantle lantern really is a technological masterpiece despite looking like it belongs in a museum.

Getting the lantern started

Petroleum, or diesel, or JET-A fuel (kerosene), or modern gasoline are all liquids at ambient temperatures and can be used in this lantern. The liquid doesn’t burn, but the gaseous vapours do. Thus, the petroleum lamp heats the liquid fuel so that it boils off, and then the gases are mixed with oxygen and then combusted. Adding an inert mantle that glows with white light in the heat of combustion makes this oxidation process produce a warm light.

But this isn’t done by just turning on a switch as with electric light, or even a storm lantern.

First off, the fuel supply line needs to be heated up so that the liquid boils into a gas before it arrives in the combustion area. This is done by either burning a highly flammable substance such as alcohol to heat up the assembly, or by mixing petroleum with air and burning that to heat up the fuel lines

Once sufficient heat has been generated to boil the main fuel supply, the lantern is turned on and resulting petroleum gas and oxygen mix is burned inside the gas mantle and that heats up the ceramic mantle (composed mainly of Yttrium) so that it becomes incandescent.