20,000 Lumens on E bay

Those 20,000 lumen torches on E bay for around $110, are they for real?
Seems something called the Beast about 10 years ago, was 3000 lumens and that was
the cats meow, selling for around $3000. Has torch tech advanced that much?

A friend of mine bought one of these. After one night of use it quit working. It's sitting on my nightstand currently,and I have no idea what to do with it. Maybe it got too hot? Maybe bad batteries? I tested them and one is a bad cell.


Sent from my iPhone using Candlepowerforums

RoyWalker said:

Those 20,000 lumen torches on E bay for around $110, are they for real?
Seems something called the Beast about 10 years ago, was 3000 lumens and that was
the cats meow, selling for around $3000. Has torch tech advanced that much?

Click to expand...

Are you the same person who was talking about SureFire 5000 mAh 18650 batteries? Well in any case Ebay isn't known for having honest lumen or mAh ratings from some questionable sellers.

Yes, that was me. Thank God I only bought 14 of them (5000 mAH) today.

RoyWalker said:

Yes, that was me. Thank God I only bought 14 of them (5000 mAH) today.

Click to expand...

I really would recommend you recycle those cells immediately, unless you have a way to test them. They are sometimes unsafe...not worth saving a couple bucks when personal injury and property damage are well within the realm of possibility. Take it as a lesson, and next time, buy quality cells! If you most buy budget, still buy good cells, and save on the lights. Much safer than buying good lights, and bad cells.

RoyWalker said:

Yes, that was me. Thank God I only bought 14 of them (5000 mAH) today.

Click to expand...

Didn't people in that same thread warn you not to buy them yesterday?

I'd just bought them, THEN read the replies. THEN I found the thread on exploding 18650's where the guy about
blew his thumb off. In Life, timing is almost everything eh?
At least the one guy said that it's like riding airplanes, paraphrased "lots of people ride airplanes and do it safely. Every now and then you hear of one crashing, etc."

Amazon and ebay and lots of internet marketplaces are like the wild west when it comes with electronic gadgets. Experience and patience and research are required to prevent getting burned.

There are some multi-emitter "can" size lights out there for relatively inexpensive (~$30-50) that run on like 4X18650's, that are indeed very bright and some of them are at least reasonably well made for the money. Most of them are about half as bright as they claim, but that's still very bright.

The basic problem with a 20,000 lumen flashlight is that it is going to require about 200 watts to operate it. While you can find IMR cells that are capable of putting out about 50 watts each, they aren't going to do it for very long. Even if you have the batteries, 200 watts is an enormous about of heat to have to dissipate, and would probably require forced air cooling. Fortunately it won't have to dissipate it for long. A typical IMR cell is good for about 2500mah, or about 8 watt hours. So your monster with 4 18650 IMR cells might be able to run at full power for about 10 minutes if the LED's don't burn up before the batteries ran out .

RoyWalker said:

Those 20,000 lumen torches on E bay for around $110, are they for real?
Seems something called the Beast about 10 years ago, was 3000 lumens and that was
the cats meow, selling for around $3000. Has torch tech advanced that much?

Click to expand...

Bottom line is no, that's not real.

It's VERY common for budget flashlight sellers on Ebay to wildly inflate their lumens. I see lights advertised there all the time listing 10,000 or 15,000 lumens. But it's actually just false advertising. In reality, those lights are lucky to hit 15% of their advertised output. I'd be surprised if that "20,000" lumen light outputs more than 2,500. And even that is probably too high of an estimate.

If you want a light where the advertised lumens have some semblance of reality you're either going to have to buy a premium light or you're going to have to mod your own.

I don't know of any stock pre-made 20,000 lumen LED lights costing less than $1,000. The cheapest way to get a light that actually outputs 20,000 lumens would be to buy a large host and then mod it with four CREE XHP70 LEDs. You'll also need to make sure to get a good driver to power the whole package, and with the enormous wattage the light would pull, you'd need a gigantic heatsink or possible active cooling (a fan).

I figure a skilled flashlight modder could build one for maybe $150-$200 in parts.

Fireclaw18 said:

It's VERY common for budget flashlight sellers on Ebay to wildly inflate their lumens. I see lights advertised there all the time listing 10,000 or 15,000 lumens. But it's actually just false advertising. In reality, those lights are lucky to hit 15% of their advertised output. I'd be surprised if that "20,000" lumen light outputs more than 2,500. And even that is probably too high of an estimate.

Click to expand...

And for the longest time you could buy "1 MILLION Candlepower" spotlights that might hit 100,000 candlepower ... on a good day, when the planets are aligned, the tides are out, you put a firm thumb down on the meter, using a golden sample that might have been tweaked, and you round up to the nearest convenient significant digit. OK, so maybe they performed a little better than that, but 1M candlepower is a number they never got close to hitting.

The marketing claims inflate faster than the performance of the underlying technology. One wonders if there's a relatively constant spread from less-reputable brands vs more reliable brands that report reality.



You can get 20,000 lumens from a single LED package, but it will be an array of LED dies that are difficult to form into a reasonable beam.

This is a 20,000lm flashlight,(well 21,500lm to be more accurate),on back order right now as it is hand built by vinh in a fenix tk75. But around $1000 buys you a very special light ....................................
http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?400812-TK75vn77-Ultimate-Flood-)

Justins measurements

Fenix Tk75vn77
Sony vtc5
21530@ turn on
19573@ 30 sec
15697 high
5428 mid
63 low
11,000 lux