Safety Discussion; It’s NOT “just  a flashlight” anymore!

Okay but I’m not just talking about failures here. I’m talking about how people use and handle the lights too.
We had several “false alarms” in 2017 in Shenandoah national park where people all the way down in the valley called park rangers because they thought someone was signaling for help up in the mountains.
The waterfront police in DC have been trying to figure out how to deal with folks “spotlighting” boats on the Potomac river in the evenings creating navigation hazards.
Stuff like that

Hand an “unenlightened” a super-light with no hints and it’s amazing the trouble they can cause with “just a flashlight” LOL.

Lithium batteries are a fire risk. Avoiding the risk is not exactly foolproof. I would not want to have one of those explosions like happened in the police car happen in my car, especially if was driving at the time. The thing I worry about the most is having one bad cell in a group of four that gets into a reverse polarity. I am not sure what happens, but I heard it is bad and the problem can happen from mixing up batteries or having bad connections between batteries and the light. I don’t know if a pipe bomb is a realistic result but if it happened in the light I am sitting on or is sitting in my leg in my pocket, it could get get a little ouchy. It also is true that for every real incident involving a lithium ion battery gone wrong, there are 50 articles and videos of experiments to start fires with these things, which unintentionally show that that these things are difficult to make a fire with. The video I just watched for example started a fire by putting 220 volts onto a lithium ion battery. Ok, note to self, do not plug lithium battery into outlet for the kitchen oven or the dryer. And then for each of those contrived demonstrations, there are 700 articles and forum posts warning us like our whiney grandmothers to be careful and making it seem like these things are filled with nitroglycerin, ready to explode at the slightest shock, instead of lithium ion juice.

Even though the lights will not blind anyone, I guess, blasting the light into oncoming cars from the side of the road is a dangerous move. That explosion in the police car shows what can happen, albeit rare.

My first response to this thread was to want to accuse the thread starter of being an overweight soccer mom who was a victim of sexual assault when she was a child, projecting her irrational fear of everything fun into our innocent hobby. Upon further review, I think a continuing emphasis on safety is warranted. I don’t want to see us become pussified, but it is true these devices need to be respected to avoid losses no one would want especially if a tiny bit of prudence could have prevented it.

As long as we keep the prudence tiny, I am in favor of this discussion.

Good topic

Perhaps this will change, for the worse, when small flashlights with laser-pumped-phosphor emitters become common.

Relevant document from Cree:

Eye Safety With LED Components

found in the “Documentation” tab of their XP-L HI page:

I noticed this interesting sentence on page 3:

In other words, once an LED is in a flashlight, all bets are off.

That XP-L HI might be in Risk Group 2 by itself - relying on the natural aversion response to prevent damage to the eye - but it could be substantially more dangerous when focused by external optical components.

Please forgive me if I’ve missed it, but I haven’t seen any mention of children in this thread.

Children should never be allowed to use any light without proper supervision. It’s amazing how many otherwise-sensible adults will give a powerful light to a child without a second thought.

Children will stare into the beam, shine it in other people’s faces, light up moving vehicles, mess about with the batteries and generally do everything they shouldn’t.

In addition, a child’s eyes are more delicate than an adult’s, because the cornea and lens become less transmissive (especially of bluer wavelengths) as people get older, and it’s the blue wavelengths that do the most photochemical damage to photoreceptors.

Blue light damage is especially significant when it comes to long-term, cumulative exposure over a lifetime. You don’t have to focus enough energy on the retina to do thermal damage; you can do photochemical damage at much lower intensities, and that damage can be much more insidious.

Finally, there’s a tendency for children and even some adults to push through mild discomfort - overriding their aversion response - in order to keep staring into a light source that fascinates them in some way. You have only to look at all the people who end up being treated for eye injuries after staring at the Sun during a solar eclipse for proof of that.

That’s true, distractions to vehicles are very dangerous.
But it should be common sense that you don’t shine them at vehicles, just like you don’t throw nails on a road or throw rocks from a bridge.

There is that “common sense” thing again. To a lot of people it’s just “common sense” that the thing in your hand is “just a flashlight” and no big deal. I’ve had to educate an awful lot of people that 2000 lumens and up is more than “just a flashlight” and you have to have a bit of respect for the light and what it is capable of.

It’s not just blinding to that car passing by on the road, it can be blinding (at the right angle) to someone a couple hundred yards away or more because it has that much power. People simply do NOT understand that instinctively and as more and more powerful lights become common I think it is going to be a lot more important to educate people on light etiquette and actual safety.

A mis-aimed car headlight (at about 2500-3000 lumens) is a terrible thing from distances a half mile away. Imagine driving into someone’s 5000 lumen, turbo-head, throw monster even though they are a freaking half mile away and completely unaware that they are blinding you.

If we don’t start educating people now, the legal regulations will come, count on it.

It’s still “just a flashlight” even though it may be powerful.
Just like a rock is still just a rock.

Need to know what happens when a 18650 LiIon cell goes into thermal runaway & vents in side an aluminum flashlight during a controlled test? here you go.

The 18650 light:

The video: 18650 in Flashlight venting Test 1 - YouTube

also two 14500 lights after cell venting. ( this light below, the cell shot out through the front like a slug round. ( i have videos, but haven;t had time ti edit them to put them online yet, i will try to get them up soon.

This cheap tiny “3W police” AA light with a 14500 vented and blew out both ends. the cell disintegrated.

The heat was so intense in just a few seconds, it changed it from black to the brown anodizing color.

Not to be Mr Glass Half-Empty, but there’s a general truism that goes into discussions/debates like these.

People are idiots.

Take some time, let it sink in, then reread it again.

You take a decent light, not even a GT or anything, and some idiot will take it out and start shining it at oncoming drivers right before a curve, to watch the now-blinded driver almost crash, maybe just to get some yuks, maybe to video it for yootoob, who knows. Or slam it into “SOS” mode and go shining it over the water, or from a hillside, etc.

Lasers and airplanes. Flashlights and cars. You know it’ll happen when some inbred moron thinks it’d be oh-so-funny to take his new shiny flashlight out for a test-drive and do something retarded like that.

And bigger-idiot politicians are nourished by such incidents. It gives them purpose in life, to find a new scourge and propose Legislation™ to “deal with the problem”. And B’harni (pbuh!) help the rest of us…

And the fawning “news” media will fall into line right quick, interviewing the widow of the guy who wrecked after being blinded by an assault-flashlight, showing tables lined with lights with “attack bezels” and “tactical” this and “tactical” that. No foybezels here, only medieval-looking pointy attack bezels!

But hey, we should all be for “reasonable” flashlight laws. Maybe waiting-periods for flashlights. Battery-tube limits of only 3500mAH maximum. Background checks to make sure no mental-defectives could get their hands on flashlights. Limits on maximum OTF lumens (after all, no one needs a flashlight with 4000+ child-killing lumens, right?). Flashlight registration and licenses. You name it.

You think I’m being facetious? Just wait ’til some 85 goes and does something stoopit with a Q8 or GT or…

I’m cringing right now just thinking about it.

What if you shine a light into a drivers eyes and they are blinded and crash lol.

On a serious note i think i wrote about this the other day. None flashlight enthusiast buying high power flashlight with out any protection features. Also using high drain cells with no knowledge. Very different outcomes if you put a battery in reverse in a brand name light vs a BLF A6. The E40R i just reviewed has reverse polarity protection while the later does not. Also a very different outcome if you short circuit a high drain cells vs a protected cell.

As the number of users increases we will see more incidents that is how it works.

My little bros mate vapes and he had VTC5 in the vape i checked the cells for him and they where already down to around 2.7v each. I think that 2.5v is cut of for the VTC5 and he was still using them. I did have a smoke before checking lol.

Alas, “common” sense ain’t all that common.

Some idiot “kids” were just sentenced a few weeks ago for killing a guy after throwing chunks of concrete off an overpass at moving cars.

Years before, a kid in a safety(!) seat was killed by some idiots who threw a bowling ball off an overpass.

Me, years ago, I saw a half-brick bounce off the road in front of me and bashed the crap outta my car. Dent in the hood as it scraped over it, one wiper arm went flying off completely, other one was bent in the middle, had 3 holes in my windscreen that I could fit my fingers through, before the brick finally bounced up and over the remainder of my car. Got sprayed with shards of glass, was bleeding from my arm (just splinters, thankfully, and only little dots of blood), and that was it. Railroad bridge over an expressway.

See my previous post.

People are idiots.

Never forget that.

If something’s stoopit, some idiot will go and do it. Count on it.

Yep. Like I said…

Damn, that’s actually quite nice! :smiling_imp:

Excatly.
So what are you going to do?
Ban concrete and bricks so that nobody does that?
They will just find something else to throw and inconvenience everyone that uses concrete and bricks for their intended purpose.

You’re never going to solve people’s stupidity so the best that can be done is educate.

Heck, nobody seems to care that the D4 is a potential pipe bomb if the battery is accidentally put in backwards…

People should have that tattooed on ’em at birth.

You’re very wrong. There are many non-enthusiasts buying Maglite, Petzl, Led Lenser and similar brands because they seek quality tools.

Lithium-ion battery safety 101

Still, these can contain multiple 18650s and do over 1000 lumens.