7 cree torch questions...

Hey all,

I bought a 7 cree xm-l torch recently and being a noob to high powered led torches, I bought myself some cheapies that I have learnt is not the way to go. I have done a heappp of reading around and I wanted to confirm what I have read is right and applies to my high powered torch.
AW is pretty much THE battery. Otherwise its Orbtronic or this other one that starts with a P. Very hard to find any of these besides the AW! Am I on the ball?
And as far as protected vs non... I understand protected can be limiting but its safe. Though if you trust your charger and youre knowing when the torch has gotten too dim and to pull the batteries... non protected is the way to go?

:welcome:

Safety is paramount when dealing with Li-Ion batteries. Protected AW's are a trusted option. Protected cells will stop you from accidentally doing 3 things:
1) over discharging the battery - ie running it too flat to safely recharge.

2) pulling too much current - ie running too hard and risking . In a High powered light this may mean that the light trips the protection and won't run, but that is a Good Thing™ as it will save you from nastiness. If your light is sufficiently powerful to trip the protection circuit on 2900 or 3100mAh cells then you should be looking into IMR cells that can handle the extreme current.

3) Over charging

If you have a good quality charger that you know safely terminates when complete then reason 3 is less of an issue, but the protection is still critical for the first two reasons.

Some lights have their own low voltage protection built in, which is great in a single-cell light, but once you're running a few cells in series, I'd always go for individually protected cells.

Say you have a light with 3 cells in it. The Low voltage cut off for the light may be set to 9V (to safely terminate the light when the cells are at 3V each). If you have 2 strong and one weak cell (after a lot of use this may very well be the case) and they're not protected you may find they come out of the light at 3.5V, 3.5V and 2V. The 2V cell is badly overdischarged and unsafe. Not to mention that under load it may well be pushing towards 0V or even negative voltage. This is a Bad Thing™!

With protected cells the weak cell would cut itself off at 2.8V - the others would be much much higher, and your runtime drastically shorter, but at least you wouldn't be left holding a pipe bomb. You would still need to replace the weaker cell, but your safety has been maintained.