Can someone please explain why a battery carrier is needed for flashlights that have batteries standing next to each other?
I purposely chose to limit it to these types of flashlights since it may be practical to have a battery carrier for flashlights that have batteries standing on top of each other.
For example, the 4 AA Sunwayman D40A and the ThruNite TN4A have battery carriers, but the Nitecore EA41 and the Jetbeam SRA40 do not.
From my experience, given that I have 2 D40As and used to have a Nitecore EA4 (old EA41), it’s much easier to change the batteries without a carrier. With a carrier, you need to remove it, take each battery out, put new batteries in, and then put the carrier back into the flashlight. Without a carrier, you just tip the flashlight and all 4 batteries come out and just slide in 4 new batteries.
And, it seems a battery carrier would add to the cost of the flashlight. I could be wrong, but it seems it would cost more to make a structure to hold the batteries outside of the flashlight than to just hold them within.
Maybe it’s a perception that a battery carrier means that the flashlight is of better quality? I know when I first got my D40As, I thought the battery carriers were a neat design, but since getting other (non-AA) multi battery flashlights without a battery carrier, it seems a carrier is not really needed.
While it’s much easier to change batteries without a carrier, it much easier, faster and cheaper to machine a plain ‘tube’ like the D40, then sub-contract the battery-carrier to another factory.
On the old Sunwayman V60C, the carrier actually had a built-in fuse, but of course once that was blown you had to replace the entire carrier. Some reasons I see for a carrier aside from protection:
clever electrical routing (as with the D40A and TN4A) so that you can insert it in either way and not really worry about polarity (but of course, you still need to ensure you put the batteries in the carrier in the correct polarity first)
allows potential physical lock out of the light (you'd have to nearly unscrew the SR40A's tailcap all the way off before you can lock it out thereby exposing the o-ring and threads)
quick swapping when you have a spare carrier with batteries loaded (as implemented on D40A/TN4A allows you nearly mindless battery changes in the dark - try that with the SR40A...)
reduces overall weight of the light since there's less material used in the hollowed out tube to accommodate the carrier
Overall, I actually prefer the carrier for above reasons but obviously to each their own. ^_^
Hi tatasal, I agree that there must be a business reason (cheaper) or a manufacturing reason (easier/faster) to go with or without a battery carrier.
In regards to costs, the D40A is significantly more expensive than the EA41. Maybe that’s due to other factors than just the battery carrier. But the EA41 and the TN4A cost roughly the same. I guess it would be hard for me to argue that costs to the consumer equals costs to the manufacturer.