How hot does it have to be to damage lights?

Overlooking the batteries, how hot does it have to be, ambient tempature wise, to damage a light that's like in a car on a hot day or one that's lives in a garage 24/7 or something?

If you are overlooking the batteries, heat is not an issue.

Yeah, it's probably in excess of 100C before some of the materials start getting damaged from the heat. You're likely not in serious danger until you start approaching the melting point of solder, though I suppose if the light uses cheap plastic components it would be whatever the melting point of plastic is.

Anyway, there's no issue in a car, unless it happens to be that Telsa car that is orbiting the sun.

I can't give you a specific temperature (only a manufacturer could do this after extensive testing of a specific produced and then rated for a specific temperature range), but heat over a long term is alway detrimental to any device with integrated circuits and capacitors, hence why most devices include thermal cooling in their design. Even with flashlights I would recommend that you keep them out of direct sunlight if stored in a vehicle, under normal operation most flashlights rely on heat sinks and passive cooling (i.e. holding in your hand) which would not apply to a flashlight sitting on a dashboard in direct sunlight.

I doubt you could damage a modern LED flashlight with any amount of environmental heat. Most of the components inside are designed to be soldered and can probably withstand hundreds of degrees.

If you live in a desert and leave your black colored aluminum flashlight on the dashboard of your car, there's probably more risk of your light melting your dashboard than there is of heat damaging the light.

There is an exception however: if the light in question is powered by a li-ion battery, if it gets too hot the battery (and light) might explode. It would have to be really hot for this to happen though.

Awesome, thanks for the replies I feel much better about everything now. Reason I was asking is because I started leaving an alkaline light in the side pocket on the drivers side door of my vehicle. I remember from last year that the AC vent in the spare room where I keep about 75% of my spare lights in doesn't work as good as the rest of the house. Last summer when I moved in it was like 95 outside, the rest of the house was around 71 to 73, and the tempature in this room stayed around 78 on a good day, but around 80 to 83 on a bad day. It does get at least some AC cause when the power was off one day it got 90 in there and the rest of the house just that one day. But running around 80 makes me comfortable with them being in that room if they can survive the 100+ tempatures in a vehicle

mountaindewer said:

Last summer when I moved in it was like 95 outside, the rest of the house was around 71 to 73, and the tempature in this room stayed around 78 on a good day, but around 80 to 83 on a bad day. It does get at least some AC cause when the power was off one day it got 90 in there and the rest of the house just that one day. But running around 80 makes me comfortable with them being in that room if they can survive the 100+ tempatures in a vehicle

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Yes, the temperatures that you're speaking of will have no significant effect on those lights. I leave lights in my car frequently, including an old PD35, year round here in AZ, where the interior temperature can get to 175+ and I've never had a heat related problem with any light. Certainly, high temperatures degrade the cells but that's well past any of the temperature figures that you mentioned.

I would be more concerned with alkaline batteries leaking than heat damaging flashlight components.