Again I will weigh in on the Aladdin Lamps and pure paraffin fuel. Just recently we got 20" plus of snow and the power went out the first night it started falling. Usually I rely on the generator to power the house and keep the heat pump running, but our primary unit took a vacation due to a mouse house that shorted the main bus bars (I still need to repair it) and the secondary, which is identical, decided that it was not going to take the same load that the primary unit did before the rodent damage.
This left us with light and water from our well pumps and not much else. Upon waking the next morning the house was stone silent, stone cold and totally dark. The night before the generator had run out of fuel, I keep 100 gallons of diesel for it, but it needed 12V to power the transfer tank pump and the generator is US Military that runs on 24V (yes, I could have separated the battery connection to get 12V, but who wants to deal with that when it is dark and snowing like mad?). Being that was the case, I went to bed knowing that we were in for a long, dark and cold morning until the wood stove could be brought up to speed to do its thing.
In the meantime, and getting to the actual point.. I brought one of the several Aladdin mantle lamps we have into my office the next morning, closed the door behind me and got it started. Took a bit to clean off the layer of dust on the lamp since I have been remiss and not run any of them in more than seven years, but it fired right up using the old paraffin that was still in the fount. It produced more than enough light to easily see by, and more importantly provided much wanted heat for the small room. The radiance of a 60W bulb and the accompanying byproduct of a massive amount of heat in the process is
not something that a standard kerosene lamp will give you.
Yes, there are concerns over Carbon Monoxide using any combustion based lamp indoors, but with the Aladdin lamps running Paraffin I have never experienced any of the symptoms of overexposure to Carbon Monoxide while using these lamps in the more than 25 years that I have used them for light, heat and/or just plain ambiance in my house. Typically the actual flame in these lamps is only 1/8" - 1/4" in height maximum, the heat is what excites the mantle to produce light and not the flame itself (same principle as the Coleman Propane Mantle Lanterns).
And, yes, after heating my office a bit and getting the wood stove going, I went outside in the snow and addressed the fuel problem for the generator and brought it online once it was finally light outside
Lesson learned from that one, a new spare deep cycle battery is now stored just for pumping fuel when needed
As with all things, this is just my $.02, not professional advice, YMMV
