One of the things it’s easy to get obsessed with is finding the perfect flashlight. It’s a never-ending game because there isn’t a perfect flashlight and because even if there was, not every flashlight is perfect for all situations.
Even if you do find a perfect flashlight, since you don’t need it all the time, invariably at some point you’ll go back to it and the batteries will have leaked all over and corroded everything and you have to throw it away.
That very thing happened to Steve this week and he went on the hunt for a new perfect emergency flashlight to keep in the car. I’m not sure he found the perfect one, the one he found has a lot of capability and also shouldn’t leak battery fluid into itself.
He found the Spurtar Solar Powered Flashlight on Amazon..
The Spurtar is designed as an emergency device to keep in your car. It has one single button to control all of its functions, and the light performs in three distinctly different ways.
In the primary mode, one press turns on the flashlight which is a 300-lumen LED, and a second press dims the light. A third press and the flashlight goes into a rapid blinking mode. You can imagine stranded on the side of the road that this very bright blinking light might be a good way to catch a driver’s attention that you could use some help.
If you hold down the button, it changes mode. The Spurtar is around 8 inches long, and less than 2 inches in diameter (3.5 inches for the head). The side of the flashlight is an LED light panel. A long press of the button switches to the light panel and turns it on full blast in white light. Imagine you’re trying to change a tire and you want to make sure you don’t lose any of the lugnuts — the light can stand upright and provide a large area of light.
Just like the primary light, a second press will make the LED panel dim to around half power. Unlike the primary light, it doesn’t have a blinky white mode.
However, a third long press turns the LED light panel red, in one of two blinky modes – fast and slow. This would be the ideal mode for letting drivers know that you’re on the side of the road and perhaps need assistance, or at least not be run over.
You don’t have to manually cycle through all of these modes one by one to get to the one you want. A two second press-and-hold cycles from primary light to white LED light to blinking red LED and then when you let go you can cycle through the modes within that light.
I tried to take some photos of the Spurtar in the LED modes and it was so bright it was blinding and the blinking red actually made me feel a little bit ill. I think that’s a good enough testament to how bright this emergency light is!
But wait, that’s not all that the Spurtar light can do! It’s got a big pointy metal punch on the side to break the glass in case you’re trapped in your car, and on the opposite side, it’s got a seatbelt cutter.
On the tail end, it’s got a compass and a tether for the flashlight. You can unscrew the compass end. The Spurtar is actually one 2000 mAh rechargeable battery, so when you remove the compass, you see a micro-USB charger connector to recharge the light. But you also get a USB-A connector to charge smaller devices like phones. There’s a red LED in there too that lights up when you’re charging – blinking means it’s charging, solid means it’s done charging. The instructions also say if the LED goes out, that means the Spurtar has gone into protection mode and won’t operate until you charge it.
Not only is this not going to have leaky batteries, modern cars have USB charging for your devices, so you could recharge the light from your car. It’s more environmentally responsible to use a rechargeable light too. They say it will take 3-4 hours to fully charge the Spurtar battery.
I said earlier that the entire side of the Spurtar flashlight is an LED light panel, but that’s not actually true. It’s actually three rows of LEDs separated by small, monocrystalline silicon solar panels, and all of it is protected by a cylindrical plastic cover. They say you can recharge the Spurtar with solar power in a snappy 30-40 hours. So maybe not a good emergency solution but when you’re planning ahead you could just leave it outside for a couple of days.
Steve and I were originally very confused by the teeny green LED on the solar panel area. We’d see it on, but then it would go out when we moved it. Lots of experiments later, we discovered that the light is indicating that it’s charging from the sun (or ambient indoor lights). When we were moving it, our hands were covering up the solar panels!
I think it’s pretty cool you not only get the ability to recharge from your car and charge your phone from the Spurtar, but you can also charge the Spurtar from the sun.
The final trick of the Spurtar flashlight is that it has a strong neodymium magnet on the side. Their ad says this is so you can stick it to the car while you’re changing that tire. It would have to be a pretty big emergency for me to even consider damaging the finish on my car, but I suppose that could be useful.
The only thing the Spurtar doesn’t do is allow you to focus the primary light by twisting the end ring. The light is a medium-wide spray of dimmer light with a very bright center, which is the best compromise they could have done. I also wish it was USB-C instead of micro-USB, especially since it says USB-C on the side of the box.
Amazon at the time of this writing sell a pair of Spurtar solar-powered flashlights for $28 or $20 for one. If you’ve been looking for the perfect emergency light for your car that’s versatile and could handle a lot of situations, the Spurtar might meet those needs