you can also get single cell chargers for like $2
they may be slow, 200-500ma, and no fancy metering
just a red/green LED - maybe
wle
—oh - that should be all the charger you ever need…
wle
Keep in mind, asking a question like “what’s the best light out there that I should get?” or “teach me everything about flashlights” isn’t likely to get much of a response. They’re way too vague. Analysis paralysis, and all that.
“What light should I get?”, well, whaddya gonna DO wittit? Searching a huge field for critters is one thing, carrying a keychain light to plunk a key into a hole is another. And one thing that flat out pisses me off is getting shot down at each suggestion.
What about light X?
Too big.
Light Y?
Too small.
Light Z?
Don’t want a sideswitch.
ad nauseam, like, wtaf??, to the point you wanna tell the asker to go f himself. Why wrack your brain coming up with suggestions when the SOB is just gonna find something to DQ the suggestion whose initial question was too vague to begin with?
And someone once asked publicly where to get XYZ, and I suggested something and even looked up and provided a link on Amazon. And I got back a snotty “Duuh, I’m not even in the USA”, like I’m supposed to just know that, and the person’s location field was either blank or had some cutesy text instead of an actual location.
And while people are generally helpful, no one really likes to spoon-feed. If someone wants to be taught “LED Emitters 101”, all the different types of LEDs, color, tint, CRI, etc., uhhh, no. There are plenty of articles already written about that. But if there’s a question about something specific, like, “Okay, I see the same LED described as ‘3V’, ‘6V’, etc., so what does that mean?”, that’s at least specific enough to warrant an answer.
Places like ‘flashlightwiki’, ‘battery university’, etc., are out there, and lots of info can keep you busy for quite a while. Digest all you can, and lot of people will be more than happy to fill in the gaps.
Good charger…you’re set.
A multimeter will let you check a lot of things. In this case, simple voltage checks, but with that you can assure yourself that the charged cell coming out of the Xtar or out of a built-in light charger is where it should be (previously you were wondering about that). You can also check cells that have been sitting unused on the shelf for awhile to see if they have self-discharged to any degree that points to degraded life. And if you want to try to get a reasonable estimation of total mAh capacity of your cells, you can drain them down to something close to the factory specs (usually 2.5v, depends)…check with the multimeter to see where the voltage is, drain a little more if need be, and when you’re at that low voltage, charge them back up at a low rate until they’re full……see what the charger tells you for how many mAh it put in.
You don’t need all of that, but it does help you learn and understand and to keep tabs on battery health (more important if you buy cheap cells or get cheap cells with lights you buy…laptop pulls…cells that you’ve used a ton for a few years, etc). The charger you bought will serve you really well, though…good choice. One tip, since this is new to you…two tips….try not to let the spring-loaded charging bar contact thingys snap back (either with no load, or smacking onto the bottom of a cell where it might dent it), and when you go to insert or remove cells, pull the cell back enough to get good clearance and tilt it in/out carefully (so that you don’t tear the wrap, mostly). Other than that, sit back and enjoy the light show. 
DMMs are like $5 at harbor freight
Don't buy a $5 harbor freight meter ..Such garbage .It's as bad as buying a flashlight from them .. best to sharpen up a rusty screw driver and fall on it ..
But it’s perfectly fine as long as you’re not measuring mains voltage.
The Sofirn sc31pro has Anduril correct? Keep in mind that its voltage reading may not be perfect. Also this is the kind of a situation where having a DMM would be handy. So you can have another way to double-check the voltage of your batteries.
Yeah, I would not trust the readout on the Anduril firmware. Consider the voltage check on the sofirn (or any Anduril light) as just a close-enough guideline to help you know how much time you have left (or, say, if you’re a guy that only wants to run his cells down to 3.5 volts before charging, then it helps for that scenario).
The SC31 Pro comes with original Anduril and the voltage check cannot be calibrated. In Anduril 2 they added that calibration feature and you can change it in .05 increments…but of course for that you would want the truth-telling accuracy of a multimeter so you know what the voltage of the cell actually is before telling the light what it should say. This isn’t critical, though…that’s not the light’s job really.
The charger shouldn’t have overcharged it to the point of rising voltage. When the battery is full, the charger will not completely shut off but the charging current drops WAY low so it’s like a very slight trickle charge. Not enough to increase voltage or capacity any meaningful amount.
Ok, so don’t let this feel too techy, but here’s a testing measurement graph from HKJ’s review of this charger that might help you understand what’s happening. It’s showing several things but what we want to look at is the red line and the red scale on the left margin…this is voltage as the cell started on the charger (left) and then completed its charging (right). But bottom line is that the charger is likely accurately-correct while the feedback from the firmware in the flashlight is not…but without a multimeter you just need to have some faith.
Looking at the red voltage line, you can see that when he first puts the battery in, it’s reading just under 3.5 volts. And it charges and charges and the voltage rises gradually and it keeps on charging and then somewhere around 2-1/2 hours it reaches the point of about 4.15 volts. And then the red voltage line starts to get flat instead of continually rising. This marks the almost-end of the charging process. After all that running it’s time for a cooldown lap. What happens now is that the charging current starts to diminish rapidly…a good charger like this one will taper down so that the voltage does reach that nice 4.2 volt top off (or really close) but the current is low and gets lower and lower. This gives the cell time to cool off a little and take that last final bit of energy for a good complete charge.
This brings us to the darker green line (ignore the bright neon green) and the green scale on the right margin. This is the charging current that is going in to the cell throughout the charging process. It starts way up top, pretty much on the 1,000mA line…which is 1 amp. He selected the 1 amp charging rate for this test. The current stays constant, like filling up a pool with a hose. Now, right around that same 2-1/2 hour mark you see the green line cross the red voltage line….and then poof….the bottom falls out and the green line plummets to the bottom quickly. That’s the charger saying, hey, we’re about done here, taper off so we can go home boys. Takes a little time for the current to drop all the way down to that minimal trickle charge level (HKJ stated that it was 70mA). But at this point there’s basically almost nothing going in to the cell.
That said, since it doesn’t totally shut off (many chargers don’t) it’s wise to remove the cells from the charger not too long after they have finished their charge cycle. You won’t hurt anything or risk overcharging them if you forget and leave them on overnight or something, but it’s just best practice to stay attentive and pull them out when finished. There are some poorly designed chargers that might actually hurt the battery or worse if they exhibit bad termination characteristics, but this is not one of them. It’s doing a great job.
I guess this is like filling that pool with a hose but then right as it’s almost full you reduce the amount of water so that you can juussst fill the pool without making it overflow. I think onboard charging circuits inside of flashlights mostly do the same thing, less sophisticated, and it seems that they vary a bit as far as when they decide that they’re “full”…but not in a disadvantageous way or a dangerous one…just not as accurate as a good dedicated charger.
(I can’t seem to get the direct link to the pic to show in this post….so a link and then just a link to the review and you can look at the first graph that you come to)
http://lygte-info.dk/review/Review%20Charger%20Xtar%20VC4%20UK.html
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I hear you. I’ve just spent the kids’ next week lunch money
Kidding, kind of, but I’m brand new to flashlights and only joined this forum a couple of days ago. I now have three flashlights on the way. One was an AAA multi chemistry impulse buy before I came across here and the other two affordable-ish Convoy T3 and S2+ based on recommendations from here. I have a ton of AA, AAA, and 18650s around the house.
The S2+ I got in 2700K and 3x7135 becasuse I do not care about brightness and was more interested in an “old school vibe”. However I’m not sure of my decision but it seems to be something I can mod in the future after I learn more.
Have you come across a good, comprehensive but not too intimidating, reference on drivers? Been trying to read up / watch videos / on LED theory and practice, current limiting, voltage regulation but it’s all over the place and quite overwhelming.
B
Don’t worry, it’ll turn up somewhere.
It would be a good idea if you are going to be having multiple batteries around.
For example, you could check the accuracy of your new charger.
Or at what voltage your light cuts out for low voltage protection (if it has that feature).
This stuff ain’t rocket science (or I wouldn’t be playing with it). It’s only a hobby (keep repeating that as you buy more and more lights).
Keep reading and asking questions. The worst that can happen is getting a snooty answer.
All the Best,
Jeff
Take peak at Big Clive and a look at cheap DIMMs
Take a break…come back to it later. In the meantime enjoy the heck out of the lumens you have and don’t worry.
Main takeaways so far are that chargers are generally more accurate/trustworthy than the circuitry in the lights themselves, but the multimeter is the real truthteller, even the cheapies. So use, charge, rinse and repeat, don’t sweat it. You have good equipment in the charger you picked, the cells, and the lights.
This one is WILLINGLY drinking the kool-aid! Run while you still can!! Run!!!
Whoa! Absolutely not! No breaks! You gotta push push push, right on through! Push push push! All the way, all the time, right on down the line!!
See??
Flashlights are pretty simple devices. A LED, switch, battery, and driver (or not, some just have a resistor). They really only get complicated when you start delving into the realm of driver circuitry, resistor modding, boost/buck/linear/FET, ser interfaces (Anduril, Narsil, 4-mode, 5-mode groups, etc) different types of optics (reflector, Carclo, TIR, aspheric) and the eccentricity of various LEDs, types, binning, CRI, BBL. Most of us don’t concern ourselves with those too much and focus on the basics. I fall in the middle of that chaos. You will find a common ground the deeper down the rabbit hole you go, and strike a balance.
Stick with the basics. Those links are all good resources, or flashlight wiki. CRX on here has a great guide. You can also check out 1Lumen.com for detailed flashlight reviews.
An 18650 will work where an 18350 does with the appropriate tube. Manker to my understanding doesn’t use proprietary cells like Olight or Nitecore does so any 18650 should work. If the Manker came with 18350 button top cells, then you’ll want to use 18650 button top cells.
Electrically, they are all 4.2 volts, so no need to worry about destroying anything. Drivers also have low voltage protection that shuts down the light when the battery gets to about 2.7 to 2.9 volts.
Yep, no problems…you can interchange those 18650 in all your lights, and you can use the 18650 in the 18350 lights.
The secret here is Voltage. Since these are all the same lithium-ion magic sauce, they all have the same basic chemistry and voltage even though they may be in different sizes or rated mAh capacities. They call them 3.7v “nominal” these days (way back in the day it was 3.6v but they’re basically the same thing). As you know, most rechargeable batteries come off the charger with a full charge that is a somewhat higher voltage than the nominal number. Like for these it’s 4.2v standard rather than 3.7. And for NiMH, which is nominally 1.2v, they’re usually 1.45v off the charger.
When baking bread, you can use different size loaf pans. Same thing with the lithium-ion here……18650 is a standard loaf pan, 18350 is a shorter pan, and 21700 or 26650 are just larger pans…but the same bread baked in them.
Where choosing a battery comes in to play is just when you have high drain lights (i.e. the drivers in those lights allow higher amounts of juice to flow). All three of these lights are not really high drain even though they can ask for a fair amount of current from the battery. Let’s say you had a light with a hotrod driver that wanted 10 or 12 amps instead of the usual 2-5 amps….in that case you’d either pick a battery that could deliver, or you’d get much lower performance all around from a standard battery (less light, more heat (working harder), much shorter run time). So it’s like the high drain bread has caffeine in it. Ha.
If you want to pick apart the particulars of those batteries, you can learn more when you’re ready for that (understanding capacities vs. current, those nice graphs, etc, etc). But the two batteries you show here are fine for almost all lights. If you ever end up with a hotrod light then maybe you’ll want something slightly different, or if you want a tiny bit more run time then you could also buy a battery that’s slightly different. But those are fine. (I actually have both of those, one each, that came in a Sofirn SC31 Pro and the Wurkkos FC11…I usually use a couple other favorite cell models instead but I’ve used both of these a fair amount just to see how they did - no complaints and they perform very decently.)
When you see the voltage stats for a driver or for an emitter, those are different sorta, but the lights are still based on that normal 3.7v that lithium-ion gives us. But all of these parts play together in an electrical circuit design. It only gets weird when you see these proprietary cells of various kinds but they’re still doing basically the same thing. Standard parts are nice.
Pardon me if this is tooooo basic, but I’m wondering if looking up a very simple introduction to electricity would help you out? The basic definitions and examples of voltage, current (amps), resistance, etc. Doesn’t matter if it’s talking about A/C or D/C for just learning that part.
Awesome!
Well…no, multimeter can’t measure or test for the CDR on a cell…not by itself. That takes some more equipment and the know-how to set it all up. This is when the people that can put all that together for us really shine…like HKJ and Mooch and several others. With a multimeter you can check voltage. Some will have a setting to measure DC Amps up to a certain amount (usually a max of 10A) and you can use those to get a rough idea of how much current the light is using on various settings (at the tailcap, usually…but what the LED actually gets will be slightly different).
Even when the battery wrap might state amps or maybe say it in a different way with “watt hours”, it doesn’t tell you much about the battery’s performance under load even if they aren’t lying about it to begin with. So you look at the reviews - or rather, the tests - for cells and you can see how they perform. It’s not uncommon for a cell to say it’s 35A but in reality it might only do 20A before it falls on its face. Some hold true, some just don’t….the tests with the handy graphs tell the truth. You can compare those results with the amps that the light will draw - either from reviews/tests that have measured that, or from manufacturer statements where those are available. So your light’s driver might let it pull 6A on turbo? Most any decent battery will do that…BUT…some batteries may do it better (less voltage sag…means it will maintain higher outputs for longer and usually will get you the full rated capacity vs. cells that can’t hold the voltage under larger loads. This is one of the big differences between quality cells and cheaper cells).
There is a general relationship between capacity and amperage performance. Mostly we see that the cells with higher mAh capacity just cannot handle the higher amp draws very well. So like the Samsung 35E with 3500mAh is a great cell, I think rated at 8A continuous, and it can hold its own, but at current draws near that max it may have a bit shorter run time and not give you it’s full capacity. It’s just part of the chemistry and construction. Newer cells are closing the gap but it’s still a general rule. Comparing with their 30Q which has “only” 3000mAh but can handle higher current draw….well, it’s a better choice if a light can draw 8A or more, and if much more than that then the 35E would be a poor choice indeed. So…generally more amp-ability means lower capacity. At lower currents, however, sometimes it’s a washout and they can actually perform close to the same…depends on the cells being compared and the currents asked of them.
Basically I think you can just ask…does this light need a high drain cell? If it can pull 6A or more, then that answer is probably yes. And if so, then just pick one up like the 30Q, or a Sony VTC6, or similar. If not, then most normal cells are fine. And you can run the high drain cells in the lower draw lights as well (possibly with shorter run times but that’s not an absolute even if the mAh capacity is lower).
It took me awhile til I was comfortable and understood basics of electricity, too….and then a little electronics on top of that. I could understand it, I just wasn’t terribly interested until one day I really needed to know, and it gave me a bigger reason to be interested. And repetition never hurts for learning. So learn bits and pieces, come back to it again later if it’s just not sinking in right away. I think that’s probably what most people do unless they’re immersed in a course. The more I started to learn the more I saw how MUCH there was to learn. It’s incredible really. And that can be with “rough” electricity for machinery or basic supply, or with fine and ridiculously complex electronic circuit designs. These guys that design drivers and firmware are amazing….the guys that design laptops and operating systems…geez. I’m glad I can understand mostly what is going on in a vehicle these days….