Hi folks,
With all the recent upsurge in interest with this light lately, I’ve taken a second look at mine, in addition to my other handheld spot lights that typically use heavy 7ah-20ah lead acid batteries. All of them pictured below were heavily used some weeks back due to Hurricane Sandy and the blizzard we had here. Some of the lead acid batteries didn’t hold up due to age and finally gave out with such heavy demand put on them.
With my supply of lead acid batteries having dwindled, and having put off purchasing LiFePO4 batteries due to cost, after 3 years of procastinating, I decided to finally spend the money for one battery as a test, and I’m sure glad I did, and purchased from BatteryStuff.com linked below.
The best choice for me at this time was to start with the Shorai LFX142-BS12 14Ah battery in Shorai’s Case #2, small format, as seen in the photo below. 14ah is the highest capacity for this size casing.
Weighing in at a mere 1.60 lbs, my POB feels as if no battery is inside it and makes it a dream to carry around
now rather than lugging around 10 lbs of its former weight.
The Shorai Case #2 Format is smaller in every dimension compared to a 7ah-9ah lead acid battery
as in the above photo.
Another angle shows even the width is smaller as well.
The battery ships with a huge amount of padding, which not only protects the battery during shipping
but also serves to take up space in whatever application it’ll be used in so it doesn’t slide around in the
battery compartment. Obviously neccessary due to this type of battery being much smaller than what
it replaces, but much higher power. The padding is high end, can be cut to any size with scissors, and also
has a self-adhesive backing should you feel you need to stick the pads onto a surface.
Charging the battery can take place in several ways. If used in a motorcycle, the charging system
will work fine. In my case, I tried using the on-board charger for the POB, which is enough to bring
the battery to about 92% of full charge or about 13.25v, and naturally can’t balance charge the battery.
So I opted for the Shorai charger with automatic balance charge. Just plug it into the
charge/balance port and press the charge button and that’s it. When complete, it’ll charge the battery
to 14.3v and an audible beep will be heard for a few seconds.
It’ll remain fully charged for a very long time unless it’s connected to something with
parasitic drain. So there is no need to maintain this battery, charge it and basically it stays that
way ready to go. I’ve gotten so tired of constaintly having to keep my lead acid batteries on my solar and
Battery Minder chargers all the time to maintain them properly, I suspect this will be the start of something
great.
*_BTW, automotive chargers such as BatteryMinders and the like, must not be used with this type
of battery due to the automatic desulphating systems they have and will damage the battery.
_*
With the new battery installed without any foam padding, it sort of gets swallowed up in the POB.
However, it was necessary for me to add several inches of the padding forward of the battery to
get some leverage and move the battery back towards the access panel. Without doing this, the
POB became very front heavy and simply falls forward onto itself. So that fixed that easily enough.
Without doing any full run tests yet, my 9Ah lead acid battery usually gave me about 90-105 minutes
runtime. With this one, I’ll be well beyond that figure. What’s more, this LiFePO4 loves high current
draw. It just sits at 13 volts and won’t budge. Even my lead acid batteries fully charged to 13.1 volts,
would immediately sag to 12.2 volts and slowly start to drop even further from there.
If I come up with any additional useful information, I’ll be sure to post about it.
From left rear to right : Delta PowerKing 12 Volt LED Circa 1960, Julian McDermott Handheld,
Homebuilt Par 46 Sirennet 1,600 lumen LED, Spare POB, Teledyne Hand-held Model 211, Primary POB
