I use my LD20 daily on low walking my dog at night, and a few other things. Batteries last about a month.
So once a month I unscrew it, look at the threads and pop in new batteries. Usually I dont have any extra spares so I have to charge the dead ones (eneloops) so I screw the cap back on so it wont get dusty or anything while it recharges overnight.
My E01 used as a neck light is going on a few months on the same AAA eneloop I guess I dont use it that much. Even if it has a 10hr run time, at 20seconds or 1minute a burst that lasts a long time.
How often do you find yourself changing batteries on your most used light?
Way too often. Just because I’m always screwing around with stuff and I have nothing better to do. Usually my batteries never get much below 4.0V. I need a life.
On my EDC lights, I recharge/replace the batteries at the end of day. On my other lights that use alkalines, I check them and test them about once a month; to see if any leakage etc.
I don’t charge the li-ions very often just because they don’t get a lot of use and I have quite a few of them.
The AA and AAA HIMH gets charged fairly often. My Zebralight H51f gets used the most and I recharge them when high mode no longer works.
I have enough that I don’t have to wait for the batteries to recharge however.
Most of my batteries don't get used as much as I'd like because I have way more than I need/use. Out of almost 200 nimh's - 140 of them are eneloops (1st & 2nd gen whites, costco eneloop tones, regular tones, glitters, duraloops and xxeloops). The rest are appleloops, powerex 2700's and energizer's.
I try to rotate them all and I might use them once every 3 months but most of the time they just collect dust. So I do a 3 month maintenance routine (discharge & charge) on them just to keep them fresh but mostly to give me something to do. I like checking my database just to see how they compare to the last time I did maintenance on them. I know, I know -- I need a life.
Not all that often. Unless it is one of the more powerful ones - they tend to have short runtimes. Ran a cell to cutout last night just to see if it would cut out on low voltage.
My most used light, an LRI Photon micro freedom, still uses the same battery after 3 months of daily - limited time - in house use. My second most used flashlights are usually using a 16340 / week or a 18650 / 3 weeks (these are my most used formats).
For-play flashlights is another story... It happened to deplete more than 20 batteries in a day (18650, 16340, 14500) while playing, lux measuring, checking runtimes, temperature e.t.c.
"For-play" is how nearly all of my batteries see use. I will rotate a different 18650 in my EDC L2P every few days or so but I basically only need (and use) one flashlight. Pretty funny when I think about it.
The lights I take to work tend to be of the ten minutes at full power variety. If they get used that day they get charged at night. Which mostly means topping back up from 4.1V to 4.2V.
Which takes almost no time.
Ran a 3100mAh 18650 dry in my latest toy. Took 7 hours to charge it in a WF-139. As that was the nearest charger actually plugged in. Unless I'm doing runtimes, they get nowhere near that low.
About every four months I re-charge my Li-on batteries that are in rarely used lights.
Maybe about every 2-3 months in the lights I use. I rarely run on High for more than a few minutes or less a day, so a charge typically lasts 90 days. My TK41 gets fresh eneloops about once every 4 months, it can run on Med or High a loooong time.
I don't have any multiple-Li-on lights so I don't worry about states of charge/discharge.
Out of almost 200 nimh's - 140 of them are eneloops (1st & 2nd gen whites, costco eneloop tones, regular tones, glitters, duraloops and xxeloops). The rest are appleloops, powerex 2700's and energizer's. 