3 X D cell X2 Zooming Light @ Tmart

Tmart tried to repay with points instead of money — to be credited only many days after return of the problem light
and
in the fine print
“A2: 10% of the order amount can be paid by Tmart Points. When you check out, the system will show you available points in this order.”

No way.
Waiting for a return label and a refund.

I would love to see how the zoom moves

You can hear at the end that it retracts when turned off.

now that’s interesting (though I expected it to be noisy gear grinding zoom)

thanks for the video :smiley:

My Tenergy cells came. They are charged to 1.29 V, though nothing in the description said anything about low self discharge. Perhaps they charge them before shipping them out.
I get 1.0 A with the rechargeables and 1.25 A with the Alkalines. Very disappointing! I had expected a big increase. Either the current is not as sensitive to the battery resistance as I expected, or else the NiMH cells have high internal resistance.

I’d suggest faking up a holder for three good Eneloop AAs and see how they do, albeit briefly.
And try putting the Tenergy cells through break-in cycling if you have a charger that does that.
The blue Tenergys are pretty old. But after cycling a few times in a Maha break-in mode, mine are anywhere from 1.31 to 1.39 a day after being charged.
I did have several DOA (0.0something voltage, and “High” in the charger) when I bought batches of them, and that was a year or more ago.

My charger will cycle them, but it has only two slots, only one amp. and it will take magnets to use both slots, so cycling three 10 Ah cells will take some time. It discharges at half an amp. which is almost a day!
I still don’t see any of the more recent grey ones for sale anywhere. The other choices are the white and blue ones, or rigging 3 x AA substitutes.
This is the size of NiMH cell my car uses. I don’t suppose it would miss three, lol.

aside, don’t bother trying to reply once Tmart’s chat bumps your problem to one of their departments.
Their email is write-only:

well, I got a rather mangled return label in email (misaligned text overlapping the border, and coarse pixels — low resolution PDF). Will try sending the thing back tomorrow.

aside, don’t bother trying to reply once Tmart’s chat bumps your problem to one of their departments.
Their email is write-only:

well, I got a rather mangled return label in email (misaligned text overlapping the border, and coarse pixels — low resolution PDF). Will try sending the thing back tomorrow.


I ’oogled: tenergy nimh D
and then image search — finds an awful lot of the outdated blue cells, a couple of images of the gray (which I’d never come across before)
but the few I checked were labeled “Out of Stock”
Seems only the white ones (regular and LSD variety) are current.

Didn’t poke through the rest to see if they’re valid sellers, might be worth looking.

Doesn’t hurt a thing. Light works fine. And these are with Eneloops.

Four AA cells will just fit in the tube. A dozen white Eneloops from Battery Junction is $32.95 plus shipping, just a little more than the three D cells cost. It would then need conducting spacers at front and back to make up the length and contact the spring and center connector.
Or 4 AAAs is shorter than 3Ds by 4.7 mm. 4 S x 8 P AAAs would fit at around $2 per cell + $20 for four 8 cell chargers. The extra voltage would make it brighter and stay bright longer.
Or if one can get it open and do a heavy mod. it could take a buck driver and 2 x 26650, with some padding, or whatever other sizes one had from battery pack pulls.
I am now charging the Tenergy D cells, then I will cycle them. The positive contacts on my charger are not iron, so I am using cork to hold thin contacts against them.
After penetrating oil, the head still doesn’t screw apart with my hands.
With the cells charged to about 1.4 V by my LiitoKala, I get 1.4 A, similar to with nearly fresh alkalines.
I am starting to cycle them.

I came across 4xAA adapters recently — searching, I see Garrybunk started a thread here: 4xAA Battery Carrier now at CNQG (Near Fit into Maglites)
The ones I got almost but don’t quite fit this 3xD zoomie, but probably could be carved down (the end disks are a bit too large diameter)

Oh, and in packing the 3xD to send back to Tmart, I notice a hole punched through both the mailer bag and the crushed white box at one end.
I suspect the head of the light got stepped on badly; looking closely, the red ring on the lens end is a bit squeezed on one side.
Tmart has really terrible packaging — a thin plastic mail envelope with no bubblewrap or anything, just plastic film.

The light comes in a thin white cardboard box — and they’d half-wrapped that — leaving an inch or so of the cardboard box at each end unprotected — with a slab of bubblewrap taped around the middle.

I’m going to pad it rather better for the return mail and keep photographs.

I cycled two of the three cells. My charger measured capacity on discharge. I got 8.4 Ah for one and 6.8 Ah for the other. These are supposed to be 10 Ah cells, so they do appear to have suffered from long storage. I will cycle the 6.8 one again while I cycle the third cell.
The second time I cycled the poorer cell it held only 5.5 Ah. The third one held 9.0 Ah. Maybe I will contact Battery Junction about the poorest one.

Which charger gives that capacity info for D-size NiMH?
I’ve been meaning to add wires to my Maha MH-C9000 or find an adapter to check the ones I have.

It is a LiitoKala Engineer LII-300. D cells don’t fit and the positive contact is not iron, so I use a cork to hold a plate against the positive contact and clip wires to the plate and to the negative slide contact. I then use magnets to contact the cells. It discharges at half an amp. and only does two at a time, so it has taken days. For some reason that I don’t understand, mine leaves the cell in an uncharged state and I have to charge it in an extra step. It is nothing like an ideal setup, but I think the capacities it measures are accurate.

After cycling the stronger two cells once and the weaker one twice, I read 1.38 A at the tail, visibly increasing when I short the leads together. With the tail spring braided, the actual on current is clearly slightly more than this, and there is still no sign of regulation.
So, now its output is within a factor of two of the rated output on an XM-L, with a run time something like five or ten hours before it drops to half that output or a bit less.

Dang Fritz, that sucker is loud! I wasn’t expecting that. I guess they have one of those haptic motors in there. Its a great idea, not sure about the execution.
Can it be overridden manually?? Doesn’t seem that way.

It isn’t really very loud, maybe like a digital camera. No, I don’t see any way of operating it manually.

All-Battery.com now lists the grey Tenergy D cells as available: Tenergy D 10,000mAh NiMH Rechargeable Battery - Tenergy (Item Number: 10103-0), for $9.84.
The Tenergy site says “Capable of high continuous drain of 30A.”

I complained about the worst blue/blue cell being too far below the 10 Ah advertized capacity, and Battery Junction agreed to send a new cell. I think they are all putting out way less current than they should, but I don’t have a good way to test that.

Got my Tmart refund once they received the nonworking light, and they supplied the mailing label/postage. Can’t complain.
(Well, except that if they’d bothered to put padding over the ends of the box instead of only wrapping some around the middle, it might not have been broken by the time it arrived, sigh)