low battery indicator

flashlights had come a long way but still most of them dont have a low battery indicator.

i wish my L0P had an indication for low batt.

what do you think ?

They all sort of have an indication. With Incans, they dim. With LEDs they drop from regulation and dim. Why build a seperate circuit that reduces efficiency of the light just to tell you it's low on power when the old methods work. It's like those damn annoying cell phone dings and lights that tell you it's low on power. I rather have the power to make 1 more call than to have it use it to tell me it's low on juice.

tebore, you are right that all lights have some kind of indication for low batteries .

what i want is something that indicates that the light output is about to drop before it actually does .

for example : it would be nice to know that the NiMh's battery in my L0P has lost its power(due to self discharge) without checking its voltage or trying to determine by light output.

vtt said:

what i want is something that indicates that the light output is about to drop before it actually does.

for example : it would be nice to know that the NiMh's battery in my L0P has lost its power(due to self discharge) without checking its voltage or trying to determine by light output.

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It's tough to define "light output is about to drop." With the L0P, the output is constantly dropping from the moment you turn it on. How much (or how little) advance notice do you want?

I suppose I could jokingly say that my L0P has a low battery indicator built in. It works whenever you turn the light on. There's a light on the end that comes on whenever there is less than one hour of light remaining. :lolsign:

NiMH cells are constantly self discharging. My experience has been that if I can't remember the last time I charged them, they're probably not much good now. I can only remember things about as far back as last week. Heck, it's tough for me to remember what I had for breakfast.

For the L0P, it'll run off alkaline or lithium primaries pretty well. My best advice would be to carry a spare AAA cell with you whenever you carry the L0P. AAA cells are pretty small anyway. Besides, even if you had a tiny red LED on the L0P that would light up when you've only got five minutes left, what good would that do you without a spare cell handy? If you carry a spare, when your NiMH cell goes dead, just pop in the alkaline. Stick the flat NiMH in your pocket, and charge it back up when you get home.

I had a craftsmans light that had 4 color coded leds in it. THe only down side was that it only worked when the light was on and it was pretty predictable as the beam dims, so does the led sshift from green, yellow to red.

I found a way to wire the meter to run with the light off and used rechragable D cells in it and used the battery meter as a locator for the light when the power failed. I would recharge the batteries monthly as they slowly ran down, but then again those batteries slowly discharge in a months time anyways.

I think scorpion had a light with a color coded scale on it, at least I recalled seeing one a few years ago in a cabelas catalog.

I think I saw something at lowes or home depot that had a digital meter on it for run time.

Of course after using electric wheelchairs for 9 years, I know most battery guages lie and batteries fall flat on their face when they die and you cant really measure or predict it than doing a know usage that from previous use keeps the batteries in a usable state near the end of usage before recharge.

One of the reasons the Gladius is my EDC is its low batt indicator (two rapid blinks), well before the light dims.

Not that my life depends on the light (though the Gladius was designed for people for whom it does), but it's nice to know that you're approaching maintenance when the light still has its full capability, BEFORE it's too late.

Dimming as low batt indicator works for me personally only with regulation; it's one of the reasons why I will not buy any unregulated LED anymore (I already have enough of those, and I seldom use them).

And I'm with you that NiMH need some kind of built-in capacity check, because of the self-discharge.