Nice touch with the candles!
Reminded me of my younger days.
I suggest you
give this a read. I also suggest you
read completely through the comments.
Back around circa 1960 I built my first short wave antenna, It was a 1/4 wavelength 40 meter dipole. The selection was based on the dimensions of my parents property and the availability of standing large trees.
I was also playing around with building basic crystal radios using a chunk of crystal and the then new 1N34 Germanium diode. Something I noticed (profound moment in my childhood life) was that when my antenna line (RG-58U Coax) brushed against ground, there were small sparks. While at 10 years old I had much to learn, I did figure out there was electricity present. I never gave any thought to harnessing this electricity but was content listening to WHLI Radio on headphones sans any power. The classic "Look Ma no batteries" applied.
While the presence of thunder storms in the area may increase the amount of electricity available I don't, even today, see much merit in trying to harness it.
Gary you mention:
I have a light connected to an electrolitic capacitor it will stay on for almost 1 hour from the charge in the cap. I have a diode and resistor is series from the wall 120 VAC outlet keeping the cap charged. The cap pulls power for about 2 second to charge after that there is no noticable power being used. Turn the light on and it stays on for almost an hour from the charge in the cap being released slow through a resistor. I could make more of these or a large cap bank.
I wonder if caps connected in parallel are like batteries connected in parallel. A small micro volt difference between batteries in parallel the higher voltage battery trys to charge the lower voltage battery and it runs itself dead. It seems to me if 1 cap was leaking down the other caps would try to charge it.
But you do not mention Capacitor value(s) nor do you mention the light as in current or voltage? I would be curious?
When used as a storage device capacitors are not all that great. They suffer leakage among other problems. Simply not practical.
Personally and just my thinking I see a simple solar panel maintaining a battery as a much better solution of what to do when the lights go out than trying to maintain a charge on a capacitor to power a light when the mains power goes away.
I will point out that when storms and lightening moved in my antenna was grounded, not that it would matter much with a lightening strike on my antenna but at least it was not connected to my equipment.
Ron