About how many lumens are the cheap 9 LED mini flashlights?

I bought this performance tool 9 led flashlight for like 2 bucks at advance auto. Its handy but i am thinking about spending ~30 to get a better flashlight that is around 100 lumens. I am just curious to find out about how many lumens this flashlight is to know if it would be that big of an improvement but i cant seem to find information on how many lumens it has anywhere

Welcome to CPF! :welcome:

They vary, depending on the particular LED's they sourced. But on fresh alkaline batteries most are probably in the 25-35 lumen range, I would guess. But that only lasts a short while, and gradually drops to near nothing as the batteries lose voltage and the ability to deliver current. The lights are totally unregulated, just batteries in series with the LED's, possibly with a resistor to throttle it down a bit, but most don't even have that.

The bigger differences you can get into with a "real" flashlight are a more focused beam (might not be a good thing, if you like the "blob" of light thrown by the 9 LED types), better (less blue) tint and an ability to select different brightness levels. Also, you can get away from the darn 3xAAA battery format.

Hondo said:

They vary, depending on the particular LED's they sourced. But on fresh alkaline batteries most are probably in the 25-35 lumen range, I would guess. But that only lasts a short while, and gradually drops to near nothing as the batteries lose voltage and the ability to deliver current. The lights are totally unregulated

Click to expand...

That's not necessarily a bad thing for an emergency light or a light that is used very occasionally. In an unregulated light, alkalines have one of the few advantages over rechargeable batteries with flatter discharge curves. The light gradually dims, but won't go out all-of-a-sudden. It gives the user plenty of warning and time to replace the batteries.

It's not what I personally like, but a casual non-flashaholic is probably used to a light that gradually dims (like an incandescent flashlight).

Quite true, and my wife and kids really like these lights, so I feed them a steady diet of them. They tend to disappear, which is fine, since I can usually find them for $1 each at Harbor Freight. I have never had one go bad where I could not fix it. Even the switch can be taken completely apart and cleaned, and all that I have to deal with other than that is making sure the LED board makes contact to the light body at it's edge.

But many regulated, and non-3xAAA lights do offer a long declining output when fed alkaline batteries, without the massive dump in the early part of the run like these direct drive units. But I do agree, nothing will run as long at low levels as a direct drive on alkaline batteries.

To see what we are talking about, find some of Selfbuilt's reviews in the review sub-forum and compare the run time plots for different lights on the different battery types. He has a link in his sig line to his site where you can see a list of all light reviews he has done, with links. A remarkable tool when shopping for a new light. And also a good way to kill a couple of hundred hours.