Worried about these

[jpaterso]

Hello all,

I just recently purchased a Fenix PD30, and without doing any prior research went on and bought some cheap rechargeable CR123s off eBay. Now that I've done some research I'm starting to feel a little worried about these. The eBay article can be found here (bought them over here in Australia), are these going to be a serious safety concern?

Thank-you in advance for any guidance on this!

[Monocrom]

When in doubt, dump them! The risks aren't worth it.

In this case, why risk an exploding flashlight just to save a few bucks on questionable cells?

[SilverFox]

Hello Jpaterso,

Welcome to CPF.

I don't know what the quality of those cells are, but if you run a discharge test on them I am certain that you won't get 1200 mAh of capacity from them. When you end up with 500 - 650 mAh, you can contact the seller and return them as defective because they don't live up to their labeled capacity.

Without doing a series of tests on them, it is difficult to know how well they will perform, or how safe they are to use.

Tom

[rockz4532]

When in doubt, dump them! The risks aren't worth it.

In this case, why risk an exploding flashlight just to save a few bucks on questionable cells?

+1, use some AW's

[JBorneu]

From the ebay pictures, the cells don't look like they have a protection circuit, even though the ad says they do. Cells with a protective circuit have a metal strip running down on the side under the plastic wrapper and you can see the shape of the circuit board at the underside of the cell. If your cells don't have this, don't use them, return them and request a refund because the advertising is incorrect.

[jpaterso]

Terrific, thanks a lot for your advice. I'm glad I looked into all of this before putting these into my brand new flashlight!

Cheers.

[65535]

They'd probably be fine, but they will take from 5-14 hours to charge. Depending of course on how much capacity they really have.