Nitecore EA8 showing 6.4 volts with new batteries?

So I just got a Nitecore EA8 and love it so far. I've got a stash of alkalines I'm trying to use up before I go all rechargeable, so the EA8 seemed like a great way to do it. I already went through one set of 8 pretty quickly. It started giving me the under 50% flashes pretty quickly and wouldn't go into turbo mode after about a half hour of use. I tossed the batteries after about an hour of use, although my ZTS was saying "40%" on them, but I've had alkalines run so hard in other lights that the resistance built up so high that even with 40% on them they couldn't power a light well.

So anyway, I replaced all 8 with new alkalines and the light reported to me that it has 6.4 volts of energy. Shouldn't it be 12 volts with 8 new 1.5 volt alkalines in it?

Maybe a short somewhere?

I don't know about this light but it might be wired with 4 cells in series and 2 parallell and then your voltage seems just right with fresh alkalines.

GunnarGG said:

I don't know about this light but it might be wired with 4 cells in series and 2 parallell and then your voltage seems just right with fresh alkalines.

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Awesome! I figured there might be a good technical reason for it, but I don't know much about electricity and electronics. The light seems to be working just fine, so I knew that there had to be some explanation. Thanks, that's probably it!

If you read the manual it says that you can run on 4AA if put in the right slots. The batteries are wired in a 4S2P configuration - two sets of four batteries wired in series, the two sets then in parallel. And if the AAs happened to be 1.6v instead of 1.5v, that would account for the 6.4v reading.