5 watt Luxeon questions...

Alright, some of you might want to kill me for saying this, but my main (and brightest) flashlight is a 3D Mag with an EverLED inside, and to tell you the truth I am quite happy with it. Anyway...I'm thinking about doing a full mod on the light and going with a 5 watt. Can I expect it to be 5 times brighter?? /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/ooo.gif Next...are there any drivers available for 5 watts from 3 batteries? (I want to keep this cheap and simple) And last...I seem to remember a thread a while back about the newer 5 watts being rated at only 500 hours? Is this true?

Yep. I think a properly driven 5W should be as bright as 4 properly driven 1W's. The Everled's lux is properly driven to 350 mA, i think, and we can assume that as the module does not get hot overtime. And you would be very likely to overdrive the 5W lux that you have, so well, you *can* get 5 times as bright as the everled. You can use BB700 or BB750 to drive the lux, or you can use Downboy and use 123 batteries inside your mag or 9 AA in series configuration inside.

Well, the last thing i heard was that they upgraded the lifetime to 1000 hrs for 5W. But if you overdrive it, well, you can kiss that written lifetime goodbye /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon15.gif :grinn:

Is the one watt still at something like 100,000 hours? Why is the 5 watt so low? If I was to find an older 5 watt...maybe in the for sale section here...would that be rated longer? I know I'm being pickey here, but if I'm going to go through the trouble to make something like this (and pay for it!) I want it to last forever...

/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon3.gif
I think so, the 1W still rated at 100,000 hrs. zmoz, i dunno what other modders have, but last forever is not inside my book. Mostly that is because we overdrive things that we cannot expect the listed lifetime anymore. I am guessing you are going to use the light intermittently, so 1000 hrs should be plenty for you. If you underdrive it or drive it at spec, it should outlast the body.

1k hours for a flashlight is an awful lot of batteries. Unless you work underground by flashlight, I wouldn't worry. (besides, Lumileds rates it @ 80% output @ 1k hours, and it's temperature dependant. Cooler is better.)

If you DO need to have the light on for several hours a day, rechargeable batteries should need replacing about as often as the LED, and you'll likely want to upgrade to the then-standard X- or Y-bin 5-watters anyway....

I'd only worry about that lifetime figure if you wanted to put it in a plastic light (bad heatsinking), permanent installation (mod-body you can't replace, like a prototype Titanium light), or a line-powered light (nightlight).

Yeah yeah yeah...I like to worry! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/tongue.gif I just thought of something else to ask...if a 5 watt is made from 4 1 watt dies, why is it not 4 watts?

It's called marketing. Actually the 1W are typically driven at 350mA and a Vf of 3.6V (middle of Vf range) gives you 1.26W. 1W LED's with the range of Vf's dissipate anywhere from 0.8W to over 1.5W.

CM