bellefied, I have one, it’s nothing special and definitely not something you’d replace the batteries within easily. It’s lasted well for about 1.5 years and still works ok now, but at a depleted rating. I was thinking about trying to replace the cells but in all honest one of these battery boxes look a better bet, and I’ll probably replace mine with one.

Surely you really don’t need it on high apart from on descents though do you? And sadly they only tend to take up a fairly small part of your ride.

I ride a lot of twisty tracks through woodland, and it is just nicer on high.

Could easily get by on medium though, personal choice.

I don’t see the point of making it look like daylight to slowly grind up a hill.

I guess as pointed out above it depends where you ride, but with the kind of riding I mostly do it tends to be reasonable length climbs followed by quick descents – there’s not loads of undulating stuff.

Occasionally pressing a button doesn’t qualify as faffing around in my book.

Don’t get me wrong I’d like batteries that last forever but I also don’t see dipping them as much of a hassle at all. I used to ride at night with 2 x 200 lumen torches and that seemed fine, even for my local DH track – so using these on low half the time should be no great hardship.

I can see scope for a higher capacity battery pack for my bar mounted light say a 6 or 8 18650 cell bottle job, I already use a 4 cell pack sat rattling about in a converted storage bottle which is ample, but setting that up to hold more cells sort of makes sense to me.

The goal of such an exercise would be to achieve longer general run time, i.e. I could wring many more hours of normal, mixed Hi/Mid/Low use use out of my bar mounted light and charge them far less frequently, obviously there is a weight penalty in doing that, but I could live with it, to only need to charge the cells once a fortnight during winter would be great…

Using your lights on full all the time just sounds like a bit of a waste to me as well TBH. I dip mine for Bridleways and Road sections and turn off the Helmet light when its not needed, running a constant full power death ray would surely just mess up your night vision anyway, having the lighting proportionate to what you are actually doing makes sense… You don’t drive everywhere with you full beams on do you?

I can’t see me needing any more run time from a noggin light, its normally used on full power, but for no more than perhaps 25-35% of a typical night ride…

I simply don’t have enough continuous trail riding available from my doorstep to need more than an hours full power burn time on my noggin, YMMV but I really can’t see the need unless your doing some sort of mid-winter Night time super Enduro… Which does sound like a pretty awesome race format, Hmmm…

I’ve just down a run time test on the X2 light to see what sort of use I can get out of it on this week’s ride. I use a waterbottle to hold my battery, which is big enough to take two of the 4 cells packs, so I made a lead up to run a pair of batteries in parallel in the hope that I’d get a couple of hours out of it.
I put the lamp in the fridge to help keep it cool and I got barely an 1hr15 out of them before the protection circuit cut in 🙁
This was using batteries which had both given 2hr30+ on the single XML-T6.
I’ve got another battery to try on it, but I don’t have much hope of that lasting much longer.

The batteries that come in the kit aren’t up to the job of running these lights, and I wouldn’t run one on it’s own without a backup. The voltage drops off very quickly at the sort of current these lights draw, and it doesn’t take long for it to get down to the protection circuit’s cutoff point. When the light goes out it seems the only way to reset the protection is to connect it to the charger. Just disconnecting it and giving it a few minutes to recover doesn’t work.
The design of the LED driver seems to be designed to maintain a constant power output – the result being that when the battery voltage falls off it increases the current draw to compensate, which just kills the battery even quicker.
My advice would be to avoid using the batteries that come with the light, or if you do use the high power mode with caution. As soon as the battery warning led starts flashing on the light cut it down to low power to avoid it cutting out all together.
I wouldn’t recommend the twin LED to anyone unless they already have a decent battery to power it.

I’ve ordered myself a set of Samsung 2.8Ah cells with solder tabs, which I’ll make up into a 5.6Ah 4 cell pack. I’ll have to pinch the circuit protection PCB out of one of the Chinese packs as I can’t find anywhere in the UK that sells them mail order. I’ll probably order a couple more Samsungs and make a little 2 cell pack for the T6 lamp I’ve got on the helmet – it’ll be small enough to stick on the back of the helmet, rather than running the cable down to my pack.

I came across a nice single XML-U2 LED unit on Amazon which looks like it might make a nice little helmet mounted light – it looks tiny!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pellor-Portable-Waterproof-Adjustable-Bicycle/dp/B00AZFJVA0/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=2MOQOKQ3PIYDZ&coliid=I38LIMC4NFVID9

I’m not so sure about the X3 light now. The heat output on the X2 is pretty ridiculous, and the X3 is going to run even hotter. You’re also going to need to swap the standard battery for a decent quality 6 cell, at least.

To be honest I’ll probably run the X2 on the mid setting for most of the time, but I still want a battery capable of running for 2hrs on full. I don’t want to have to monitor my use of the light, otherwise it’s always going to be in the back of my mind how much full beam I’m using.

It’s been quite interesting messing about with these cheap lights, but looking at how much I’ve spent so far, I kind of wish I’d just stumped up £115 for the Fluxient 3x U2……

I ordered one of these 6 pack batteries from fasttech – not had a chance to try it yet as the X2 hasn’t arrived.

http://www.fasttech.com/products/0/10004539/1347108-8-4v-6600mah-2s3p-6-18650-rechargeable-li-ion

I ordered my X2 as the light only anyway. Fasttech seem to have an ok reputation from posts I’ve read on mtbr. I will post up how I get on with it.

Mine runs on full for an hour before going down to 2 indicators, but then goes off within the next 15 minutes. Lasts twice as long on medium though, so not too bad.

MarkLG has pretty much made the points I would have.

For sure the Fasttech 6600Mah is cheap – but there’s a reason for that 😉 Bottom line you haven’t a clue what you’re getting really…

The head unit on its own can be had for peanuts so I’m quite happy to take a punt on that whilst building a battery that I know will have the minimum output it needs…. and one that can be used to improve the life of my existing set up / be used in my single cell torches.

That’s pretty much what I’m finding – the voltage holds up pretty well for the first hour, but drops off very quickly before shutting down. If you want to get 2 hours out of the standard battery you can only run on full power very sparingly.

Christ this is a long thread, i’ve had three glasses of wine and just need to know..

Can I get a decent usb or plug charging ‘the aliens have landed’ light setup for under 50 quid?

Theblackmount, on it.

I ordered some 3100mah panasonics with tabs on and put them in an old magicshine box (the one with the voltage display). Some dodgy soldering and scary short circuit moment later and i have a pack that just ran the X2 on high for 3 hours.
Going to build another one using loose 3400mah and battery holders. Prefer the idea of being able to switch the cells without needing the soldering iron, just need to make it waterproof

>I ordered some 3100mah panasonics with tabs on and put them in an old magicshine box (the one with the voltage display). Some dodgy soldering and scary short circuit moment later and i have a pack that just ran the X2 on high for 3 hours.<

That’s far more like it. Based on that the 3400Mah Panasonics should be on the money.

My X2 lasted an 1hr15mins… Charged it up, now the three lights on the back come on, but the light will not turn on! 😡

I contacted Solarstorm direct and they came back with a price of £90 for 20 units delivered by Fedex (which might mean customs charges on top).

So £4.50 + 30% + UK postage will probably come out at £8 a battery holder.

I’m not interested at the moment (can’t afford the panasonic cells and a charger at the moment), but I can forward the quote to anyone if they want to take it up. Email in profile.

If the battery was run right down how long does it take to fully charge them? Got them through the Crawley guy with a UK charger if that makes any difference.

Until the light on the charger goes from red to green. I take it you go a UK charger with indicator LED? I bought from the Crawley guy and contacted him to confirm the light was supplied with a UK charger as per the pics – I got a 2 pin and 3 pin in the box.

Nice one Ollie :tup:

What LEDs are in the X2 lights you’ve got?

ollie, emailed you yesterday, after being pointed to the MTBR thread… did you receive it? (or is it sat in your spam folder…)

I think the ssx2 is perfect on medium for majority of night riding, high is silly bright, great for twisty downhill id say.