I have yet to see anyone mention a ‘blackout room or rooms’ for your house. If you use a coleman lantern inside when the power has been down for any length of time, it is very noticeable from outside and from a long way away. To counter this and allow you to have a brightly lite room inside where you can have even rudimentary comforts like readsing at night, figure out how to ‘black out’ the windows and glass panes on doors, so that a central area inside is not going to allow light out for tipping off roamers looking for that one lite house among a neighborhood of darkened dwellings. Duct tap and layers of tarps works. If there are spare blankets which can be hung over the tarps or black plastic bags taped to windows from the inside, this is a bonus because it airs the blankets when hung up.
If that becomes an issue, I'll leave a light buring, and go to one of my hunt spots and resolve that little problem.
I don't put up with criminal crap in the neighborhood now, why would I do it any other time?
/johnny
“I have yet to see anyone mention a ‘blackout room or rooms’ for your house.”
I bought cheap black out accordian type black paper “blinds” to quickly hang in windows. There is sticky on there to fold over and seal and put a pressure curtain rod (cheap) through it and hang it up in window. No light gets through those black paper blinds. There are different widths and I got them on Amazon. They are in their boxes taking up practically no space at all right now.
Once up, they can be folded up, accordian style, for during the day and there is a clip to put on them to keep them up. At night, take out the clip and they fall to their full length and black out any light going to the outside.
There, stopped the light from going outside.
I bought some black out blinds for our bedroom from a place online called Select Blinds. Once I saw how well they worked, I pondered buying more for other rooms - just in case. I used the same type of blind all through the house, only light-filtering in the non-bedroom rooms. They could easily be swapped out with black out shades if I bought them in the same size for each window.
The nice cordless honey-comb blinds are pricey but I bought them in sets during all the buy-3-get-1-free sales (usually on holiday weekends).
Back in the olden days, the 70’s, we bought a wood stove and looked into insulated window coverings. The suggestion at the time was a lightweight insulation board covered with an inexpensive quilted fabric stapled on. It would keep the light in and keep the winter cold out. It would be really inexpensive to do.