Picked up a pair of these on my last RMM order since they were only $5 a piece. Not particularly impressive at 3 amps.
A big difference between the batteries! And a huge voltage sag.
cheap for low drain stuff.
very poor cell to cell matching though.
Better capacity than most 18650s, at 1A draw got close rated at 3850. Still a good value for average flashlights. Would you run 87 octane in your Ferrari?
I got a blue one in the l5 gift set. 1 amp discharge gave 4500mah
The voltage sag is hard, no matter the capacity. You want voltage under load to be a high as possible and 3A is not even 1C discharge on 26650.
Are you sure the wires aren't too long from the Turnigy to the cells, that voltage sag is very high for 3A on a 26650.
that hit me too later on.
any other 26650 on hand like a kingkong?something with a known performance graph from hkj?
post a pic of your setup.
Actually I had the Sanyo 18650 in mind, not even a 26650, the UR18650FM would result in higher brightness at 3A on a linear driver than those Supfire.
The Turnigy is just for charging, can’t do anything more than a 1A discharge. I’m using an old DuraTrax ICE as my current sink logging to a PC via a DMM.
Here’s a King Kong 4000maH unprotected on the same rig at 3A discharge
Aaaand now you know why they were only $5 a piece :bigsmile:
Nice flashlights but not so nice batteries from SupFire.
Thank you for the testing and for sharing the data.
Found a few problem with my measuring setup. Pretty big voltage drop across the stacked banana plugs and I wasn’t measuring voltage at the cell, so numbers were lower than what you would see on an HKJ review. Made some improvements and reran the tests. The Supfires evened out a bit after a few cycles and the measured capacity is a bit higher now that they are getting all the way down to 2.8V. Still no match for the King Kongs, but did beat a 2yr+ old Trustfire Flames 26650 that has been cycled a lot and sits at full voltage most of it’s life.
Good update. What software and hardware are you using for datalogging?
Thanks for sharing. It certainly isn't as good as some of the better 26650s, but in most stock lights I think it performs alright. Definitely better than any 18650 I can think of in the price range (again, for a normal 3A or less light). What remains to be seen is how it holds up over time.
MasTech MAS345 for voltage monitoring hooked up to an old laptop. Samples once per second. Since the Intellipeak ICE draws a constant 3A down to the set cut-off voltage (2.8V), I just take the array of voltage values from the CSV and throw them into OpenOffice calc to compute the mAh and do the charts. I also have an Eagle Tree v3 data logger that measures Volts, Amps, and Total mAh that I used to verify my revised setup, but it samples every 100ms and creates HUGE data files when in Live Mode. The Intellipeak also shows current Volts, Amps, and Total mAh as an extra sanity check (that’s where I realized I had a huge voltage drop due to the cheap stacked banana plugs).
Not as nice as a BK Precision 8500, but it’s all gear I had from my R/C hobby and gives me a good idea on cells.
I’m not ready for the level of testing automation that HKJ has, something simple to log voltage vs time like that MAS345 might be a good investment for me. I’ll have to think about it at around $50. I’d definitely like something with turnkey software which generates CSVs.
Thanks for the info.
There’s more options on the market now for a PC connected DMM then when I bought the MAS345. For about the same price, there’s now the Uni-T61E which is a 22,000 count meter and also offers a native USB cable (for extra $$:money_mouth_face: if your computer doesn’t have RS-232 and you don’t want to use an adapter.
http://www.amazon.com/UNI-T-Digital-Ranging-Multimeters-Multitester/dp/B007THZMWI
Or for $30 there’s this guy
Check out this guys YouTube channel for lots of in depth DMM reviews