Peter Atwood
Enlightened
I've been using and collecting nice flashlights for almost ten years now. For the past couple of years some of these lights have gotten incredibly powerful and I've enjoyed playing with them. However, I've recently gotten more into some specialty lights such as stuff that uses rechargeable li-ion batteries and such. And after spending hours and hours studying up on it I am coming to the realization that I am out of my depth. It's like you need a degree in electrical engineering to even begin to understand this stuff. I think some of these super lights and their associated batteries are damned dangerous, especially in the hands of someone like me who just cannot get their head around all the conflicting and extremely confusing information. I'm a pretty smart guy (or so I'd like to think anyway) but after spending hours and even days of my time studying up on it I still cannot seem to fully grasp all of the issues or the differences between some of these cells.
The increasing reports of battery fires has me extremely concerned. I think I'm going to be dumping all my high end and specialty lights and simply stick with single cell lights that take normal batteries. From what I can gather single cell CR123 or CR2 lights are probably safe enough but that's about as far as I'll be going with all this. You guys that want to burn your houses down for your hobby can have right at it but please count me out. I mean, ask yourselves honestly, given the amazing output of the newer generation of LEDs is all this risk really worth it? Do you really need more than 100-200 lumens OTF for most applications? I don't. Just saying...
The increasing reports of battery fires has me extremely concerned. I think I'm going to be dumping all my high end and specialty lights and simply stick with single cell lights that take normal batteries. From what I can gather single cell CR123 or CR2 lights are probably safe enough but that's about as far as I'll be going with all this. You guys that want to burn your houses down for your hobby can have right at it but please count me out. I mean, ask yourselves honestly, given the amazing output of the newer generation of LEDs is all this risk really worth it? Do you really need more than 100-200 lumens OTF for most applications? I don't. Just saying...