The $40 headlamp that kept dying at 20% battery finally made sense

I used to think a headlamp was dead when it started dimming, so I'd swap batteries and toss the old ones. Last month at a site near Bend, Oregon, I watched a buddy squeeze another two hours out of a light I'd have called empty. Turns out most of these things drop to a low output on purpose to stretch runtime, not because they're failing. I kept three months of half-dead batteries in a drawer for nothing. Anyone else been throwing away perfectly good batteries because they didn't read the manual?

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adam9192d ago

The dimming thing is actually a feature called regulation, and it took me way too long to figure that out too. Most decent lights will step down from high to medium to low as the battery drains, so you get a gradual loss instead of a sudden blackout. That steady dim light is the light telling you it's still got plenty of juice left for close-up work, just not for lighting up the whole trail. Wild part is some lights even have a separate reserve mode that kicks in at the very end, giving you like 30 more minutes of minimal output. So yeah, I kept a whole box of those "dead" batteries too, and now I just rotate them through my backup gear until they truly give up. It's a real game changer when you realize the light isn't broken, it's just being polite about its limits.