Hello from new UV enthusiast/commercial user

Introduce Yourself
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Howdy dude,

I’ve built a Sakowuf L6 as well. Its the stronkest thing I have. Use them for hunting for fluorescent sodalites, aka Yooperlites. Ive tried a few budget options like an Alonefire 21700 light, a super cheap 18650 light and an Emisar D1k. Im ordering a Convoy M21a with the buck-boost next.

Have you thought about making a soda-can light. I’ve been looking at doing something like this for a while. Alonefire makes a few, but Im sure they suck. My alonefire 21700 felt really cheap and the driver died on it really quickly.

Szyingfeng, the company Sakowuf sources his 9090 mega emitter from, has some 4-die 5050 emitters in 6 and 12v. And might have some 6v 3535 emitters (I cant figure out their model number scheme). If you got a boost driver for something like a sofirn Q8 you could run 4 5050 4dies.

They make a 4-die 7070 that might come in 6v. In which case you could put three of them in a Convoy 3x21b if you modded the driver for reduced current output. 3x21b has pretty deep reflectors for a soda can.

The szyingfeng’s will all have limited throw though. Emitting surface is very large.

A quad Sbt-10x-uv soda can would be the best. Much more intensity to let you light things up a few meters out. It might be best if you did them in a 2s2p configuration with a boost driver that outputs at like 7.8v. Since soda can 1s? I don’t know much about how drivers work, not an EE.

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We really just need an sbt-90 UV. If you dont have an sbt90.2 light you should get one.

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I bought a few of Simon’s SBT’s with the intention of doing a multi emitter light with them.

We’ll see how that works…!

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S2+/UV, Tool AA-UV, and SF16UV. All nice, all different.

S2+ and Tool are floodier, covering a wider area with less intensity.

SF16 is throwier, good “reach” at greater distances, can get pretty intense on high and close-up.

AA/14500 vs 18650, too.

“Yeah, okay, so which one(s) should I get?”

Obvious answer, all of them, of course. Different tools for different functions. All are filtered 365nm, but that’s all they have in common.

There’s also the… Thrunite or Oilight… AAA UV twisty that could be had for 5bux from the mfr. No filter, but quite handy to have a teenytiny light to check bananananananas in the store, etc. Pretty sure that was also 365nm and not 395nm.

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Hi there, sorry for slow reply, was driving 1,800 kms back to Coober Pedy, after clearing out a storage shed in another state, whew!

So, the red definitely works well to allow UV 365 nm to keep fluorescing opals without interfering (at low levels, ie moonlight mode) in red. Depending on your UV light’s spill (Nichias have least, then ZWB2 filters block out more visible light), you may still want to turn off the red while working, as I do.

An opal miner I chatted to recently, uses a 395 nm headlamp while working with an S2+ 365 nm, which I assume gives even less interference.

Triple channel Hank lights would be good for this, but for my use case, so far, I don’t have a throwy enough UV from Hank, but have ordered a few throwier ones this week and will see how they go. Being able to mix and match your preferred channel/ramping/blending (I don’t have the right lingo yet!) in Anduril on Hanklights is a big appeal for this stuff. For my local users’ needs, I think I need more power than any Hank UV config allows (even custom emitter choices). Happy for that to turn out not to be the case, but for now, Convoy M21A is the minimum throw required for local opal miners and Convoy S12s for powerful enough short distance floody work, walking around to find fluorescent gems. I love Hanklights though and will keep testing new models with UV configs and chat more with Hank re custom options. My custom L6 from reddit user Sakowuf_Solutions is more powerful than the S12. He’s going to try and build an M21A beating thrower for me next :slight_smile:

Back to the combined UV + red/purple emitter config - I’d want ALL the power into my UVs if possible and if cooling allowed it, so would consider my safety lighting to be in a headlamp, while my hand controls the UV. That said, I’m unfamiliar with the K9.3 and if the 9 were UV, how powerful they’d be. Here’s a discussion re config with the 3 external as UVs, which sounds like they’re floody (but also some inputs from Sakowuf there, too, including on SW/MW/LW combination UV light): https://www.reddit.com/r/Hanklights/comments/15z785c/k93_released_with_uv_option_thoughts/

Just saw rusty1’s post, cool stuff! I love his D2 with green and red a lot more than I thought I would - nice effect! And yeah, that FWOD sounds pretty rad: Fullwave OD (FWOD) Preorder — Raymond Wu I wonder how it handles all 3 wavelengths from the same optics there. I’ll ask Sakowuf for his opinion about it.

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Yeah, I’m keen to explore big, higher powered UV lights, like stage spots, too. I’ve seen some of the carry-handle box “lamps” on fluorescent minerals sites, but not sure if those are purely floody things for display cases, or can be used for throwy hunting, too. For these workers on excavators, I’ll discuss that option of a mounted one. They’d still want a good handheld, as they’re getting on and off machinery and sometimes looking down shafts/tunnels, too.

(and yes, turning excavator lights off while blacklighting)

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Awesome info I understand most of it it :slight_smile: I’ll re-read and figure out the other parts! The M21As are impressive throwers. I just posted my NLD in r/flashlight with an order of 8 which just arrived, along with ZWB2s. I’m going to do similar to what another user did a while back on reddit, making a bracket to hold 4 or more of them together, basically, giving me sodacan levels of thick, throwy goodness.

The Eagtac MX30L3’s I think I mentioned in original post are soda cans with 6 x emitters and were equivalent of a bunch of M21As together, but badly engineered and high failure rate. They’ve since shipped improved models here, which some friends opted to get and I’ll find out if they’re decent, but I’m still set to build/have built something a magnitude more powerful.

I’m in chats with Nichia SG office, to order emitters here to Aus (or send to Sakowuf), but I think MOQ is 300 units still, so might need to wait to bankroll that! Hopefully, if get good models of those emitters, can push them harder. Next iteration I think will still be done with Yinggfengs.

I am every now and then tempted to buy one of the Alonefires for curiousity, but their Watt ratings vs price are clearly BS, so turns me off. I did just get this funky Alibaba soda can with handle light I’ll try out after weekend: https://www.reddit.com/r/flashlight/comments/1c252lf/nld_piled_up_after_a_week_away/

I’m excited to follow along with your high powered UV light journey and share what I find myself, too. I’ll try to update here, but tend to loiter more in reddit these days.

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Very keen to hear how you get on with this project!

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SBT 90.2 looks neat, sounds like another to add to the Hank wishlist.

On better UV emitters - do you know anything about the state of the industry in this regard? ie, is it materials tech lagging, smaller/better fabrication techniques needed or just higher price as less market than white lights?

Embarrassed to say, but as a multi-decade software engineer, I’m pretty sure I had no idea what a semi-conductor was until looking them up this morning in an effort to better understand UV emitters :smiley:

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Interesting! Thanks for the background info. I’ve done quite a bit of work as an economic geologist, but never touched opals.

Box shaped lamps mostly run fluorescent tubes, there’s not much point getting these nowadays for LW UV as LED options are superior.

I’ve a UVSystems superbright 3 for SW, it puts out loads of shortwave UV, but lacks throw for doing what you want to do. Shortwave UV is particularly difficult to generate so the current LEDs are fairly low powered, compared to the long wave options.

The one exception to box lights I would assume is for displays, where the floody light would be good for showing off your collection.

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I updated the UV flashlights page… I hope it’s helpful: https://1lumen.com/best-uv-flashlight/
btw. I found the opal pieces… but they were smaller than I thought, and didn’t show too well. Instead, I bought a few gem stones:
Septarian nodule, Anyolite (Ruby in Zoisite), Yooperlight (dragonhead).

Also, the spectral measurements don’t make too much sense, since the lowest it can measure is 380nm.

My new sphere with spectrometer are expected to arrive in a few weeks. I hope I can retest all flashlights with this new spectrometer, as it is supposed to measure from 350nm instead of 380nm. We’ll have to wait and see.

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Cheers, looks like a lot of fun!

Here’s my latest lineup, about 30 models: https://www.reddit.com/r/flashlight/comments/1dj88cb/29_uv_models_so_far/

I jumped to contenders and conclusion, will go back and read whole thing later. Couple of notes while popped into my mind:

  • the Alonefire SV84 I heard of failures from multiple people in person last week. I’ve been happy with SV52s so far, with great performance and hasn’t failed yet, but I’m still cautious that it will burn out at less than 1,000 hours, due to Alonefire’s poor quality reputation
  • I found my Convoy T2 to outperform the Lumintop Tool AA in terms of power, think it beats it on price, too, just doesn’t have the fun diffuser included :smiley:

Do you have a model of spectrometer in mind? I’m going to have to buy one soon, tossing up whether I should buy a few, in case they can’t be reliably calibrated by myself.

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Wow! That looks like a very nice lineup. I personally didn’t include mixed lights (UV + white), so I only selected dedicated UV flashlights for this test. And I didn’t include ones that are hard to come by/discontinued. I still have about 4/5 other dedicated UV lights removed from this test.

Interesting about the SV84. I’d love to hear more about that. If multiple people have this one failing on them, I will probabely need to add some sort of note/warning.

Your SV53S looks a lot like my SV43, but with a different bezel… Do you know if it uses the same LEDs?

The spectrometer that I will get is used inside the integrating sphere, it’s not a handheld device, but part of the setup. If you’re after a handheld, be careful to double check the lowest nm it measures. It’s only good to show the wavelength, and not ‘power’ so to say.
I checked quite a few offerings on AliExpress for example, and sometimes it would show a low wavelength, with a good price. But when you look at the details of the selected they are referring to a different model. And the one with lower wavelength being 1000USD more expensive :slight_smile:

How did you measure 'power’on yours? I got a relatively cheap UV light meter, so my measurements should only be compared to my other measurements, because I don’t know how close to actual it is. I added the graph to show the difference between these 28 lights, even if they aren’t 100% correct, it give a good indication which is more powerful etc.

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Cheers. The AloneFire I’m liking is an SV52, not SV53S (they should use catchier names!). It has a more serated bezel.

We’re an opal mining town and all those failures of the SV84 I heard where from opal miners, who’ll run at max as long as the batteries last. We had similar issues with sodacan Eagtacs, modified to UV, possibly just for Aus market. We also get temps up to 50C here in summer, so may add to it, but usually, they’re using underground, at a stable 23C, or at least using outside at night, when not as hot.

Spectrometers sound like will get expensive quick! I’ve been testing throw and “power” or perhaps fluorescence and phosphorescence, by positioning opal samples at a distance and seeing if a) it will fluoresce it from certain distance and b) how long it phosphoresces after light switched off. Camera recordings help with this a bit, but I need to switch to a more manual video setting to avoid any camera magic affecting the recordings.

Perhaps, along with a spectrometer, I can just setup a more clinical lab. I have a completely dark room (live in an underground dugout) and can put fluorescent markers in the room for distance and some kind of bullseye rings for measuring flood. Video recording with overlaid timer should work for phosphorescence/“power”…

For the longest throw contenders (not many yet, the Eagtac sodacans and any SBT-10X-UV lights about the longest throwing so far), I can borrow a longer cave from my neighbour, put markers out and do similar tests. It should give a good relative measure, even if not everyone is trying to fluoresce opal with their lights :smiley:

I’m also not big into mixed colour lights compared to dedicated UV lights, but will try to collect some of the more popular ones, ie my Arkfield Pro I want to compare with the EC200S UV and Trustfire Mini X3. Then, a local miner was really happy with his Wuben P26, so I tend to want to collect and compare everything people are using in town, so I can speak more informatively on them.

Once I get my comparison DB up, I’ll link to yours and if there are any other relative comparisons of a decent range of UV lights you know of, will add in, too. It will help when people ask about UV lights, to be able to save typing similar things and send them to an objective comparison.

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Good stuff.
Interesting about the SV84. I wonder what has happened… and if that could be resolved somehow. Perhaps just the heat killing them?

Gothcha… UV light meters are probably also worth investing in, since that gives some more useful numbers for actual UV strength. Spectrometers are not doing that. I’m only using my spectrometers for color measurements to be honest.

Do you know more lights that are using the SBT-10X-UV?

I totally understand that a combo set (like the Trustfire, Olight) can be very beneficial. But I didn’t want to add them personally, because that would make the list much longer :smiley:

Unfortunately, the ones sold on Amazon can be just so misleading (like any other flashlight) but there aren’t many dedicated UV flashlight makers. Alonefire probably has the most UV flashlights… and they range from poor quality to good quality, and I’m not even sure if all Alonefires are built by the same company.