When the battery fails in a Zebralight, what happens?

[Al Thumbs]

I have a Zebralight H51Fw still on its first battery, a primary AA alkaline. When this cell runs out of juice, what happens? Slow fadeout? Sudden darkness?

I have my first batch of Eneloops breaking in on the charger. What happens when an Eneloop runs out of power?

Thanks.
Al Thumbs

 

[hook63]

If I were you I would take that alkaline out and not risk it leaking in your light. I think the eneloops will dim when they get low but I never really let mine get that low.

 

[whill44]

When the juice gets low, darkness falls, a slight chill rushes in, the great gaping maul of the abyss beckons you toward it's depth. Unless you quickly replace your failing battery with your spare. :devil:

 

[squaat]

Zebralights act Like most regulated lights, when a battery can no longer sustain a certain brightness level it will drop down to the next level, and so on, until it can no longer sustain the lowest level, and then it will be dark, cold and scary.

Like hook63 said, don't try that on your alkaline, as they tend to leak if you try to coax to much power out of them.

 

[bfksc]

I have a Zebralight H51Fw still on its first battery, a primary AA alkaline. When this cell runs out of juice, what happens? Slow fadeout? Sudden darkness?
I have my first batch of Eneloops breaking in on the charger. What happens when an Eneloop runs out of power?

The Eneloops will act the same as the Alkaline and drop the output level. I have three Quark lights that run on AA/AAx2 and they all drop the output to Low as the voltage sags, and then continue to run for some time at that level. I don't know how long though as I take that output drop as my cue to swap out the batteries. I also have a recently acquired Lumintop ED20 that uses an 18650 and since both the light and the battery have a 2.8v protection circuit, the light shuts off suddenly as the protection kicks in to prevent over-discharge of the Li-Ion rechargable cell. I haven't ran it down on High or Med yet to see if it drops output before going dark, so it might drop first, then shut down - I'll have to test it. But since I always carry at least one set of spares, it's not a big deal if the lights run out of juice. The 18650 gets swapped out long before it cuts off anyway as it's best to top up Li-Ion cells rather than drain them. If I'm going away or out for the day/night I always make sure I have a fresh 18650 cell before I go out so I have plenty of juice available. For a long weekend of camping, my light can run on Low for hours each night and still last a week, longer than I need for the weekend. Come to think of it, I don't recall running a set of batteries completely dead since I switched to LED flashlights some years ago...go figure.

 

[tobrien]

nothing major. i tried to really drain a Duracell ProCell once on my SC51 and the output just became such that you could look directly into the reflector when it was on max. i eventually got tired of waiting to see how my ZebraLight SC51 would react and tossed the ProCell because its useful life was over.

 

[bbb74]

I drained an eneloop in one of my zebralights (the sc51w I think it was) one night while camping. It had already been used a lot (more than what I thought I guess) and the light was being used as a night light so was in the lowest (moon) mode.

I woke up at ~3am with the kids making a bit of noise to discover it was basically strobing in moon mode, which wasn't very pleasant!