Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsGood But Not Great
Reviewed in the United States on October 4, 2013
This item was a spur-of-the-moment purchase after I experienced a power failure the night before and realized that I could not even see my hand in front of my face. It was that dark in my house! I did some major stumbling around before I found the mini-flashlight on my key chain and was able to light some candles.
I compared items briefly on Amazon and opted for this one mainly because of its small size and the fact that it does not obstruct the adjoining electrical outlet. When it arrived, I got out my heavy-duty scissors to open the dreaded blister pack. After cutting it open, I realized that the package actually snaps open - no cutting required. Great! I like it so far.
My first disappointment occurred when I hit the on/off switch for the main light, flipped the nite light switch to Auto, and plugged it into an outlet. The extremely bright night light came on, even though it was early evening and there was a good amount of light in the room. I tried it again after nightfall, and realized that not only is the night light much brighter than I would like, it automatically comes on when there is still a moderate amount of light in the room. Because of that, I will not be using the night light at all.
The other flaw is that, while it does not obstruct the adjoining outlet, the emergency light shines toward the other outlet. If I plug anything of any size into the open outlet, such as a cell phone charger, it blocks so much of the emergency light beam that it is of little use in the dark. So, I ended up putting the unit in a duplex outlet by itself and with the night light turned off.
In its favor, the unit does look nice and seems to be pretty well constructed. Because of its flaws I would probably not buy it again. However, it's very possible that all the similar, competing products may have their own "gotchas".
