I bought an improved battery carrier too, a bit expensive for something that should have been right from the beginning, but it does help me keeping the WT90 ready to use, or else I would not use it at all.
In general I’m all for simple flashlights, but for me (and I suspect for many others), USB charging the batteries is one of the few fancy new features that I find really valuable so I am happy that the WT90 supports that, and has solved the issues with it.
Just received mine and immediately flashed it with Anduril 2 using a Hank flashing adapter board, Lexel pogo adapter, and the latest BLF Q8 firmware from TK’s repository. Awesome light!
Got the new battery carrier in today and measured the parasitic drain. I used one battery (a Molicell P42 at 4.08V)in the carrier (should not matter if one, two or three batteries are in the carrier for this measurement as the voltage would be virually the same, and so the current) and a simple bypass made of two wires with a piece of insulation tape in between.
The old carrier measured 2.28 mA.
With three 4000mAh batteries that translates to 220 days/0.6 years before the batteries are drained.
The new carrier measured 1.02 mA.
With three 4000mAh batteries that translates to 490 days/1.34 years before the batteries are drained.
That is IMO a welcome improvement and also it is nice to have an extra carrier that I can fill with batteries as an extra charge to take with me (not that the need has been there thusfar ).
I’m curious what drain others find for the old and new carrier?
I bought and received 2 new battery carriers. Here is what I measured for parasitic drain:
original: 1.6ma
new1: 1.0ma
new2: 1.0ma
I also noticed the new carriers have lower positive contacts (I like this personally) but this will require button top cells or at least solder blobs on your flat top cells.
My brand new WT90’s carrier works perfectly with flat tops cells. The positive contacts are not recessed. Perhaps mine has the older carrier? Can you post photos of your updated carrier showing the positive contacts?
Received my carrier a couple of days ago, unashamedly stole djozz’s testing idea and method in it’s entirety then added a piece of cardboard because that’s what i bring to the table.
I maybe shouldn’t have done that though because i managed to nick the wrapper on the battery (again, you’d think i’d have learnt the first time ) which may have been, in part, due to the extra thickness provided by the cardboard. So stick with djozz.
Anyway, using a Samsung 40T @ 3.9V while sitting on the floor i measured a fluctuating 355-390uA.
New carrier:
My cheapie mulitmeter is at least 20 years old (maybe even 30+) and has never been compared to another meter, and as this reading was significantly different to the 2 readings already given in this thread i doubted it, so reached for my clamp meter.
Unfortunately the clamp meter reading was fluctuating and drifting off zero so i couldn’t get a meaningful reading, but i noticed it doesn’t have the same definition as my cheapie meter which got me thinking.
I’d tested the carrier on the 2000uA range on my cheapie meter so moved up to the 20mA range and got 0.4mA, which was not different enough to mean anything.
So i moved up again to the 200mA range and voila, 1mA. Same as djozz and netprince.
I then measured the old carrier on the same three settings and as you can see, the 200mA setting is similar to djozz’s reading, the 20mA to netprince’s, and the 2000uA setting reads slightly lower at a pretty stable 1.422 - 1.425mA.
Old carrier:
Meter resistance seems to be playing a part here which gives me more faith in my meter and it’s original reading of 0.35 - 0.39mA for the new carrier. (Which would be great if that was the actual standby current!)