Mini Review of On The Road M3 Pro

That is strange. I don’t think it’s an accurate measure of drain because the battery might have a certain amount of internal drain that messes up your readings.

You might try to measure the drain with a DMM at different voltage levels to see if it’s consistent or maybe the drain increases at a lower voltage level? Usually the parasitic drain will decrease a tiny bit as voltage drops. I’m not sure how to explain your results.

It is indeed strange Jason! And guess what?
This morning I checked the voltage again and the cell was at 2.05V! So, during the night there was another huge drain.
So I decidedto put a brand new Vapcell 800mAh into it, with 4.10V. Later today I will check again how is the Voltage.

Meanwhile, I tried to measure the parasitic drain, but I am not sure if my settings on the multimeter are fine. Can you or someone please validate or tell me what I need to change?

At 2.05 volts it’s time to replace that battery. It’s toast.

Your DMM looks to be set up right, but it’s measuring 3.2 milliamp instead of 0.043 milliamp like I got. That is a huge difference. I think your M3 Pro is defective. It will continue to eat batteries. I would contact the company you bought it from and tell them it’s constantly draining your batteries in x number days.

Hum, could the value displayed be related to the screen of the multimeter (being small) or the setting itself ?

Still, I guess it must be somehow defective. I will confirm it tonight when I check the Vapcell. That one being brand new, without previous discharges, will probably behave better under normal circumstances.

I didn’t bought the M3 Pro, it was sent for me by On The Road (at AliExpress) for review. Still, after confirming if the numbers continue decreasing with other cells, I will inform them of a possible malfunction in some of their lights. Not all, of course, as yours is working properly.

I will post again tonight after checking the battery!

Thank you for the support and hints on this case Jason!

If you change the setting from 200mA to 20mA you should get a bit more accuracy. You get an extra digit from 03.2 to 3.2X milliamps. It’s still the same high reading.

If you switch it to 2000uA it would probably exceed the scale as it would be 32XXuA. This is 3,200 micro amps and I think your meter only goes up to 2,000 microamps. So over 3000 microamps compared to what it should be 43 microamps.

IDK, maybe the MCU on your light is not going into it’s lower power sleep mode or something.

Thanks for the answer Jason!!!
Last night I measured again the Vapcell battery and it was at 4.05V, which means that there was a 0.05V drain again!
I will contact On The Road to inform about this situation in case they need to verify other lights that may have this issue.!

Again, thanks for the explanation and attention to this situation :+1:

Has anyone else tried charging this off a USB Type-C PD charger with a standard USB Type-C cable? Did it work?

Mine doesn’t do whatever it needs to do to signal that it needs power, so I can’t charge it off my USB Type-C laptop, USB PD, power bank, or USB PD power brick. I have to use a USB Type-A charger with a Type-A to Type-C cable like the one it came with.