Night race

A few weekends from now, I am intending on participating in a 15 hour-130 mile canoe race. Obviously, it will be an all night thing. Last year we used a mag-led and a night rider trailrat combo. The mag being on at all times and the night rider turned on in bad spots. They both sucked. The setup was far too heavy fo the output.

Im looking for something that will last 7 hours, and have at least 200 lumens. I understand the nightrider put out 190 or so and it was plenty bright. my budget is probably around 100$ but if needed i could go up to 200.

I was thinking of getting something from DX such as http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.12060 but I don't know if i could trust it not to overheat running for 7 hours.

I am a total newbie to this lighting thing. Any advice would be helpful.

1st: these cheapos are crap.
even more crap when You need them withstand canoeing

2nd: 1*18650 can power a quad-led for 45 mins.
I dont think You want to change batts often?

3rd: single die led is bright enough for me to do mtb trail riding, good lights give some 200+ lumen for a bit over 2 hours here.

My advise were: a headlamp like Streamlight Argo HP, which You feed with an 17650 cell.
When not coming with a new led already, change the Luxeon to a Seoul or Cree. Very easy emitter swap-thing

For medium power, a 1*18650 handheld from a respected maker. Models like Jetbeam Jet III Pro Ultra, or Fenix TK11, oder Shiningbeam L-mini II, ...

For real power, a 2*18650 handheld with a quad-led.
Jetbeam M1X were the perfect one, but too expensive with all the other lights and short runtime (but better than the joke with a 1*18650 and quad),
maybe try one of the "more expensive" 2*18650 P7 / MC-E lights at dealextreme, something at about 70-80,--, they might give You a good service. Open them up and check for bad soldering points, remove metal debrits that are still inside and might cause shorts, add thermal paste under led/mounting plate/between plate and housing, check switch, grease o-rings (+ check them for watertightness)
.
.
.

that way You can use a double slot - multiformat Li-Ion charger and only have 2 different cells of almost the same size. With the same chemistry.

The headlamps are nice and should run the whole night at full power. Not too bright but pointed to there You look at, making up for quite some brightness. Overall they are flood, though.
The other lamps are at Your decision and only used shorter time.
Maybe You can live with clamping the handhelds to the front and have them run on lesser power - for longer time.

I've never tried canoeing in the dark, but it sounds great fun

How long downstream do you need to see? If it is much beyond 150 meter I think you are in HID territory...

I foresee some trouble: The rougher the rapid, the more light you need (speed increases, reaction time decreases and the need to look further down to plan ahead is greater). The rougher the rapid, the more you need the hands for paddling, not fumbling with a flashlight. Also, I guess that a bow-mounted searchlight will only point straight ahead, which is of limited use when you are doing zigzag maneuvers. (You could have a bow mounted light anyway, but augment with something on your heads).


So... the optimum solution would be something really powerful on your head. Unfortunately, those beasts are really, really expensive. (Petzl ultra, silva/brunton alpha and friends). Many bicycle lamps, including some HID lamps, can be mounted on the head or a helmet (lupine, nightrider), but they are equally expensive.


Powerful handheld flashlight is much easier to find at a price that won't break the bank. If you use a helmet it is easy to use vent holes (or drill some new holes) and strap a flashlight to that. If you don't use a helmet get a bicycle helmet - lightweight and with lots of ventilaton slots, so it's easy to strap anything to it. Any 2*AA or 1*18650 or 2*18650 powered light should be easy to mount this way. Runtime is not anywhere near your 7 hours, but should be enough if used exclusively for the rough parts.

If you like enginering your own solution, it should be fairly straightforward to make your own separate battery compartment where you have as many 18650 in parallell as you want. (Drill a hole in the flashlight body, make a stick of the same length and diameter as your batteries, feed two wires throgh the hole and fasten one wire to each end of the stick. Insert into flashlight and couple the wires to the separate batteries).


The big question is: Will 200 lumens (single die) or 700 lumens (P7 or MC-E led) be enough - or do you need to go HID?
(Edit: Multi-die (P7 or MC-E) will not reach further down the river than a single die "thrower" kind of light, but they will give a much broader field of view).

the Streamlight Argo HP (with the C4 LED) is good headlamp but i am not sure if the beam profile with a tiny hotspot & wide spill is ideal. if possuble a diffuser film could be placed behind the window to diffuse the spot.

i am not aware of any headlamp that does 200 lumens over 7 hours.... :huh:

edit:

will a high output light melt the plastics of a bike/skate helmet?

Thanks for the quick replies!
To answer some of your questions, the light will be mounted on the bow, handhelds would work great.

I believe 200 lumens max would be fine. Last year we used a nightrider trailrat which I believe puts out 190 lumens.

If no light could handle 7 hours of 200 lumens, I could get away with either a battery change or using the light on a lower setting of 50 lumens or so for 66-75% of the night.

I would love to engineer my own system. but I only have a week and a half left to get ready. It would probably have to be a fairly simple fix.

The current generation of MCE lights (Fenix TK40, Eagletac M-series, etc) can all do ~200 lumens for ~4 hours, that's about as close as you're going to get to your criteria in a production light. For that kind of brightness for a full 7 hours, you'd need something with a lot of battery volume modified, like a notably long Mag or a top-handle service light. A 4D Mag with a Malkoff drop-in would do it, but would you carry that much weight?

Thanks for the quick replies guys! you answered a lot of my questions.

It seems my replies didn't get posted. I hope this isn't going to show up a third time.

And to answer some of your questions...

A handheld would work just fine. The light would be mounted on the bow of the boat.

200 lumens max is great. Last year I used a nightrider trailrat which I believe put out 190 lumens.

if 200 lumens for 7 hours is impossible, I could get away with either 1 battery swap, or getting a light that would run @ 50 lumens or so for 65-75% of the race.

we are moving between 7 and 9 mph on almost all flat water.

I am trying to make a setup that is lighter than our mag-led night-rider trailrat setup of last year.

The mag-led was useless and heavy (it puts out 20 lumens tops?). We were lucky that we were riding wake of another boat most of the night.
The trailrat was great @ 190 lumens but should only last 3 hours or so.

I have a week and a half till the race. I would love to mod something, but it would probably have to be relitivly simple.

One option would be to buy 2x Eagletac T100C2. The Eagletac T100C2 has great throw so it should give you plenty of range for the speeds you're moving at. With discount code 'CPF8' total comes in about $92 shipped for the pair which leaves you room to purchase some CR123 batteries. If you check out the review here, you can see on a pair of CR123 batteries this light runs on 220 lumen High mode for ~2.5 hrs and 55 lumen Low mode for ~15.5 hrs. So you have a few options on how to run em:


1. 55 lumens continuous, and 275 lumens for up to 2.5 hrs. Run light A on Low the whole time. Run Light B on High as needed for up to 2.5 hrs.

2. 110 lumens continuous, and 440 lumens for up to 1.5 hrs. Run both light A + B on Low the whole time for 110 lumen output. That leaves enough battery power to run both lights on High for 440 lumen combined output for up to 1.5 hrs.

3. 220 lumens continuous. Run light A on High. When batteries run out, run light B on High till batteries are drained. Swap batteries in Light A and run again on High till end of race. Will require one battery swap.

mikkowus said:

if 200 lumens for 7 hours is impossible, I could get away with either 1 battery swap, or getting a light that would run @ 50 lumens or so for 65-75% of the race.

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The aforementioned Fenix TK40 will provide just under 300 lumens for just over four hours, so you'd only need a single battery swap. It also runs on regular AA batteries. See it here: http://www.4sevens.com/product_info.php?cPath=22&products_id=696

canoe race? hmmmm.... is it even possible to swap the batteries while keeping the inner tube of the light dry? mounting 2 lights saves critical time in a race. used alternately you have the luxury of changing the flat batteries when time allows.

or would buying a pair of lights be more practical, while hopefully keeping the weight to a minimal? if cost is not much an issue stick to 2 identical lights running on CR123s?

there are many P60 based (or similiar) lights to choose from. not to mention bulb upgrades.

If I went the 2 identical light rout, I would make a system where the pit crew could change out the light quickly while we ran on a portage, therefore saving weight. The battery changing deal would suck, especially if it where 8 AA batteries.

I would not be changing out 8 AA batteries in a canoe at night, but that's just me.

One really good way to go is to get the original Malkoff M60 and the Solarforce L2 host that fits the 18650 size battery and 1 extension tube. With 2X18650's batteries, good ones, you should get well over 3.5 hours at full power and then dwinding light for quite a while after that, with one spare set of batteries you should be good for the night. Carrying 2 spare 18650's is not a lot of weight. The Malkoff is extremely reliable, has a good balance of throw, spill for you to see what you are doing. A small single cell flashlight in your pocket to see what you are doing for the battery change won't hurt. You can mount it with a wide variety of equipment already out their that will take standard 1 inch tube lights like they have for various bicycles. If you bought 2 and ran one at a time and kept one for back up you would have the ideal set up. When you are all done, you will have a very nice all around flashlight to use for the rest of your life (if not longer) that you won't regret owning.

A back up plan to this is to get the solarforce host set up I just mentioned and the Dereelight 3 mode P60 pill. You can run it on medium and probably get 6 to 8 hours on one set of batteries just like that and only switch over to high when you need it and not use high too much. I would still carry a spare battery pair. I would ask for the orange peel reflector for more spill and smoother beam but this will still be more of a thrower with less overall spill as the down side. The increased runtime by changing down levels would be the advantage. Their latest and greatest pills are over 200 lumens on high and around 77 lumens on medium.

lighthound.com will get you the Solarforce host set up, there are other sites, FlashCrazy will get you a Dereelight pill. Malkoffdevices.com will get you a Malkoff Module.

Option #3 is to actually just buy the Fenix TA30 tactical light which is also a one inch mount. You can buy 4 each 17500 batteries, it will take a pair of them to run. It has a low/med/high switch on it and you can simply go back and forth from medium to high as necessary. The battery capacity is some what less as they are 2 17500's instead of 2X18650, but its a ready to go off the shelf flashlight that is available in several places and you can also run 3 CR123 primaries in it. I would say get 3 pair of the 17500's rechargeables and you will be good for well over an 8 hour night. this is about 200 lumens out the front as well on high, so its not a bad light, very ruggedly built.

No special battery carriers required for any of these light options I mentioned.

mikkowus said:

It seems my replies didn't get posted. I hope this isn't going to show up a third time.

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Probably because the first 2 posts of a new member is scrutinized by the moderators to see if it is a legitime post or someone trying to use this forum for advertisment or whatever... This goes quickly or takes a little time, depending on an actual human actually doing that job. :welcome:

mikkowus said:

200 lumens max is great. Last year I used a nightrider trailrat which I believe put out 190 lumens.

if 200 lumens for 7 hours is impossible, I could get away with either 1 battery swap, or getting a light that would run @ 50 lumens or so for 65-75% of the race.

Click to expand...

I'm glad ~50-200 lumens range seems to be OK for your race, because that is really easy to arrange without breaking the bank.

As an example, fenix LD20 will run for at least 9 hours (factory claims 13 hours) at 50 lumens. (Using 2*AA batteries and costing $50-60). Maximum is 180 lumens for about one hour and half (factory claims 2 hours). Buy two, mount one on the bow and run it on 50 lumens, it will last the night. Leave that light alone... Have the other ready for turbo mode (head thightened) and turn it on whenever you need more omph.

And of course you need to consider backups... which leads to the classic CPF advice: Simply buy more flashlights. Instead of fumbling with batteries you just change flashlights. Come Desember, you can give them away as christmas presents.


Oh, and did I mention that if you use AA batteries, use eneloop nimh batteries?


Now that is cleared - do you think you need maximum throw with the smallest possible hotspot or a wider, but not as far reaching blob of light? I've never paddled at night, but I think the latter would be most useful, allowing you to see a larger cross section of the river at a glance. (You're not really searching, which is when throwers really shine - you are assessing as quick as possible which part of the river you want to be in). The LD20 gives you this wide blob of light that reach ~100, maybe 150 meters downstream. You may of course augment this setup with something with more throw.


You may also consider something based on more potent battery technology, giving a increased performance and/or runtime. (li-ion 18650 is probably your best choice then) The downside is that this technology is alien to many, and requires that you do a bit of homework on charging cycle, safety procedures and the potential risks. Li-ion batteries has about half the energy density per mass as TNT explosives, so a little bit of education is recommended. :thinking: AA batteries seems more friendly to the unenlightened, so to speak... and more than good enough for the job. (Did I mention you should use rechargeable eneloop AAs???)

mikkowus said:

If I went the 2 identical light rout, I would make a system where the pit crew could change out the light quickly while we ran on a portage, therefore saving weight.

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I know weight savings is important but is it really worth the hassle to save 1/3 lb? The stats I've found for weight are:

Maglite 2D w/ batteries: 1.49 lbs
Niterider Trail Rat 2.0: 1.87 lbs
Eagletac T100C2 w/batteries: .32 lbs


2 of the small handheld lithium powered lights weigh far less than either of the lights you carried last year.

Do yourself a favor and don't cheap out on this one. An equipment failure in a situation such as you have described would be extremely bad.

Buying a specialty light for this application that you cannot resell would not be wise. You are then stuck with a high battery volume light that no one wants with very narrowly focused purpose.

My suggestion is to buy 2 used/discounted surefire e2l outdoorsmans and one f04 diffuser. The total output will be 120 "surefire lumens" which is around 200 fenix lumens (or more) in my experience. These lights will run for 11 hours putting out 60 lumens each and can be had for 120/each or less on ebay. If you PM me I can tell you where to get them for that price from a dealer.

Both lights can be mounted to the bow and one can be outfitted with the f04 diffuser. This setup will give you both flood (from diffuser) and throw from the TIR optic. The lights can then be resold for around 100/each (or you can keep one/both ). You may be able to get better than this $20 spread on ebay/cpfmarketplace. Look around.

I have personally tested the E2L under long term heat conditions and can tell you that it will NOT overheat during its 11 hour burn time. It is a great light.

Any thoughts from other CPFers on this setup?

-John

I'd go for the Fenix TK40 it's meant for exploring just order a spare battery carrier and swap it out halfway thru the race.

• Cree MC-E LED with a 50,000 hour lifespan
• 2 Modes, 8 Total Outputs
  • Primary Modes (in order)
    • Turbo - 630 Lumens, 1 Hour
    • Low - 13 Lumens, 130 Hours
    • Medium - 93 Lumens, 11 Hours
    • High - 277 Lumens, 4.5 Hours
  • Strobe Modes (in order)
    • Strobe
    • Slow Flash
    • SOS
    • Fast Flash

hmm why havent anyone suggested fenix tk20 yet? its sturdy, yellow and its a thrower and the warm tint works in nature.. works with 2AA batteries for about 10 hours in lower mode. get two of those?

i do like the eagletac tc100 suggestion too. for 50$ each they sound good bang for buck.. again get 2.

run one on low and use the other when needed. and get atleast 2 set of spare batteries to them. (unlikely you need em but better safe than sorry)

get some cork or similar that you tape or tie into on the flashlights.. they dont float on their own and piece of floating styrofoam is easy to spot with the other lights if you end up dropping one somehow.

also get one xtra small one that uses same batteries as the main lights that you keep in your person by lanyard or in pocket, it should have a sos or strobe blinker mode.. and maybe a small red plastic cone to get more attention. its just a shtf backup. (or a loaner to someone with crappy incan that failed on him)

-i would hate to go in such an trip with untested lights.. i dont trust my lights until i have used them for days and emptied few batteries. so what ever you pick use it before trip. alot. all the time.

and the batteries. check them before taking them with and be sure you have extra ones. (do not mix and match used and new ones) and if you get AA lights get lithium batteries (atleast as spares) not alkalines. also in my mind, rechargables for one time trip is pointless. in longer run, if u use the lights alot, then they make sense.