I have an Emisar DW4K with a Lume X1 driver in transit and was planning on using some 15A CDR batteries that I have lying around (AIUI the driver draws roughly 13A max). Then I started to wonder if there’s any significant degradation when a battery is being discharged near its max CDR. Anyone happen to know if there is/isn’t much of an effect?
I have some Molicel p50b’s that I could throw into the light, but all things being equal I’d rather use the 15A batteries unless there’s a significant downside to doing so.
I believe it has been mentioned before, but a cell’s biggest weakness is usually due to heat. As long as you don’t overdraw the cell and don’t let it heat up to near max operating temps for extended periods of time, it should hold to its specified capacity for its lifetime.
Anything that causes extra heat/stress to the cell will accelerate wear.
It’s like a car engine, if it can go 6500 RPM and you run it at 6000 all the time then yeah, it’s gonna break a lot quicker.
Max CDR all the time esp. when you go 100 to 0% is about the worst thing you can do to a LiIon.
could not find a runtime chart but here is a D4K review
the light will heat up quickly on Turbo, and thermal regulation will reduce the output… Its not going to stay at 13A for long. Turbo steps down after about 30 seconds:
Yeah, I figured that other than some additional wear there wasn’t much of a downside to using the 15A batteries in the Lume X1 driver light. I have a slew of them so I might as well use those and save the Molicel 50b’s for the linear drive D4K that I bought last month.
I doubt I’ll run turbo very often. Bright is good but for my purposes not needed very often, if at all.
I’d do the same as you, unless you’re in a particularly hot environment and turbo-ing the light until the battery is flat.
I still have some older “Panny-B’s” (NCR18650B) with 5A CDR, I use them in lower draw (but still c.3-5A) lights because it seems wasteful to recycle functional cells.
Yeah, it seems like such a waste to have decent and hardly used batteries and not use them. I just got my DW4K and it seems to run fine on the 15A batteries, not that I’d know if the batteries are wearing out faster than normal
Comparing it to the D4K without the Lume X1 driver makes me really wish I had also gotten that one with the X1. I wouldn’t have to feed it the Molicel 50b’s and there’s hardly a noticeable brightness difference between the 2 lights.
