P7 Failure.

Yup, after just one outing, my P7 gave up the ghost and refuses to work.

Now Ive gotta go through all the hassle of sending it back to HK!

Anyone else had trouble?

What was the after sales service like?

Seen a few reports of different type of failure (t’is only a cheap torch after-all), but haven’t seen anyone complain about Deal Extreme’s service. I’m sure I read (on MTBR?) that some-one emailed them the proof of postage they despatched a new one….

Theyve agreed to replace it, and pay for me to return it to them.

To be fair, whether it cost £400 or £40 I’d have expected it it to last more than 2hours! I’m hoping mines just a rare failure.

dare i say – buy cycle specific from this country

You can say what you like, doesn’t answer my question tho eh. 😉

Hey Stumpi

I would say its just unlucky.
I have been buying and selling these lights for quite a while now and i’ve only had a couple of faulty one’s out of over 60 that i’ve bought.

The customer service is fine, but because of the number of customers they have it can take a day or two, to get back to you.
It will take a good few weeks (3-5) before you get your replacement though!

If i was you, i would just buy another one while you wait, they’re still very cheap for what they put out.

Just ignore Ralph, he doesnt like cheap lights, but always has something to say on the subject!!

To let you know how good they are, my mate who own’s a very success full bike shop and has TOO MUCH money (imo) is going to buy one of me!!

Thanks Lightman.

I do already have a second on it’s way on the strenght of the first ones performance initially, so will have a spare.

you know what it’s like tho, you jump in and try something different only for it to fail, kinda made me wonder if I shouldve just gone the ay-up route.

I’ll give em a second chance tho.

Just an update,
My replacement has been despatched, and my postage has been refunded.
Lets hope the replacement lasts a bit longer.

stumpi – just thought you might be interested – in my experience, it’s not the torch that’s the problem, it’s the batteries themselves. I’ve had two of my P7 torches “refuse” to work with no warning (having been working fine and then suddenly going off). Popping a new and fully charged battery in there and the torch is fine again…

Hi PK,

Nice name by the way, had a Black PK on blue Tuffs a long time ago, sweet bike….

I had 4 cells at the time and tried all in it that night, none worked.
And then, the next day, it powered up for like 20 seconds and then went out again. I’m guessing it’s a connection/heat issue. Just hope my current one and the replacement don’t go the same way.

I was quite disappointed as all the talk about them was positive.

Fingers crossed.

I had to send a 2 mode P7 back, I was probably the chap z1ppy refers to above.
A lady called Evelyn at DealExtreme dealt with my return. They had my replacement ready for dispatch before I had even dispatched mine back to them, & as soon as I emailed them my proof of postage they dispatched the replacement. I received it about 5 days later.
Had a 5 mode & a 2 mode for about 2 months. No further problems whatsoever.

Strapping a torch to a handlebar and bouncing it up and down for an hour is a very good way to test for mechanical or elcectrical weaknesses. After all these are not designed specifically for vibration. Taking the so called “cheap” bike lights route is bound to give a percentage of lights that fail, just as the home-made HID fad did a few years ago. Hopefully this will be relatively few and the majority of owners will have a good experience.

The problem is not so much one of getting a replacement, but of being stranded with no light. I guess my advice woyuld be to buy 2 or more – but with some of these P7s being 40 quid without a charger, we should probably stop calling them cheap !!

BTW I use Ay-Ups (smug grin).

Marv

pk-ripper – Member

stumpi – just thought you might be interested – in my experience, it’s not the torch that’s the problem, it’s the batteries themselves. I’ve had two of my P7 torches “refuse” to work with no warning (having been working fine and then suddenly going off). Popping a new and fully charged battery in there and the torch is fine again…

Hey pk

Did you get the protected batterys??

I used them at first, but then decided not to, as i think because of the very high current draw from the LED, it just trips the protection circuit too soon and as you’ve found out, you end up with no light.

Its very easy to remove the circuit if you want to, its on the bottom of the battery and you just cut around it and RIP it out, its connected to top(+) by a thin wire which has to be removed too.
You will have to use a bit of tape to put the blue/silver plastic cover back on, but it’ll work fine after this and if you change the battery before the light gets to dim (around 60-80mins) then the battery will be fine.

Ive tested batterys after ive changed them when i do it this way and the voltages are usually over 3volts, well away from the 2.75 min of the battery.

Marv – I paid 57 dollars for torch, 2 batteries (3 hours of runtime), and a fast (2 hour) charger. That works out at less than 40 quid including postage.

The cheapest Ayup (outputting half the light of the P7 at 300 lmns) is 134 quid, or 3.4 times the price. The one most equivalent to the P7 costs 224 quid, or 5.6 times the price of the P7.

I’m not really seeing your point; it seems to me that the P7 is stupidly cheap (or possibly that the Ayups are stupidly expensive).

The P7 are good torches, but they aren’t assembled with high shock loads in mind.

Having stripped my 2 mode down i can see where it’s likely to fail, the leads to the die head look like a potential failure point due to brittle failure around the soldering and the gubbins in the tail section, which takes some removing, could do with being ‘potted’ with resin to stop them shaking to bits.

Bloody good for the money, but they will last longer on your helmet.

i think what marv is saying that your light lasted 1 ride
so £40 for 2 hours use
£20 per hour

my ayups have lasted 2 years
3 hours once a week for winter
(so shall we say 52 uses at 3 hours) so 156 hours
156 hours at £200

works out at £1.28 per hour

and that 2 lights

i still think the p7’s are a good idea, but it is always best to not throw maths arround

cheers lightman – just gone direct and ordered some unprotected ones to try, so hopefully that’ll solve the problem.

Wildrnes – likewise.

My P7 hasn’t broken yet, as have the majority of people who have them on here. Following your method of pricing, my P7 needs to last 11 rides to have bettered your price per hour (£1.11 to be precise). If it lasts as long as your Auyups do then it’d cost a whopping 26p per hour. And after 2 years I suspect the Lithums are going to be a bit tired, that’ll cost me 5 quid to fix, as opposed to 30 quid for the Ayups.

Has anyone got a P7 on the forum that’s lasted more than 11 rides….

Maths aside, I guess the main point here is that you pay your money and make your choice. I’m sure that the Ayups or Hopes or whatever are all well made, but at what price? Specialised bike firms are never going to compete with a factory in China on a value for money basis.

Ewan – mine have probably done about 40 hours thus far with commuting and general household use (like fixing a fuckning bathroom light when the pull cord pulled straight out the ceiling at midnight!)

Will let you know how the non-protected batteries get on.

Also, had a good ride with Hywel today, so if you fancy meeting for lunch / post work beer somepoint soon, let me know.

Sounds good – we could do a night ride this week?

Ewan

Nobody is knocking your lights. My point was a general one which is that these are not designed for mountain biking, they are torches. One can’t be too suprised to get a few which fail. When I look at the torches I’ve owned over the years, even the good ones, I’m not sure how long any of them would have lasted being shaken to bits on a handlebar every other day.

Also to give any kind of redundancy against light failure, crash damage, battery problems etc you would need to have two, and several sets of batteries – and at around £70 or so that can hardly be called “cheap”.

With the Ay-Up MTB kit, which granted is massively more expensive, you get two light sets and three batteries, with a minimum six hours burn time, and a very slow fade after that. That is the kind of bombproof performance I want when I am in the forest on my own at night and I might need to do repairs or walk home.

Besides you can’t compare with Ay-Ups. You just can’t. Those who own them will understand.

Marv

We appear to be agreeing…

I’m not bothered about people knocking my lights, they only cost 40 quid, that’s my point. They’re so cheap it doesn’t matter if they’re not super reliable or not – I just take a 5 quid head torch with me. If the light breaks then i’ll swear a bit, just pottle back to the car, pull it apart at home and fix it, if I can’t i’ll buy a new one. I’m sure the Ayups are nice and reliable, but for 200 quid I’d expect them to be – i’m happy to pay 5th of the price and take my chances. Guess it depends on where you ride – I ride on the north downs, hardly beyond the reach of civilisation, i’d have a different view if I was riding up Hellyven at night.

Ok well, as an update, since my P7 went tits up on the 22nd of December, a total number of 15 days have passed (including christmas and new year!).

The replacement has just arrived and paypal have informed me this morning of the refund of my postage costs.

That, is good service!

Just to add, my original 5-mode P7 has been in constant use (bar mounted) since mid October, for commuting & weekly night rides, so has been in use for approx 70 – 80hrs. Still works.

It was my later 2-mode P7 that died. The culprit was my 3yr old son who left it switched on high, & stood it face-down onto a work surface in the kitchen. DealExtreme didn’t quibble over issuing a replacement though, service was very good.

I don’t think its fair to compare them to Ay-ups or any other dedicated kit. They are designed for a specific application, & having owned a Hope HID, I’ve no doubt they do it very well. The P7’s offer a good alternative for those of us not able (or too tight!!!) to spend a couple of hundred quid on some lights. If I had the money I’d use a dedicated kit, but the P7’s are good enough.

Taking my P7 out for its first ride up Cut Gate tonight, hope it holds up. Im using it on the bars with a Hope HID on my lid. Really, really impressed with how bright it is for the money. Astonishing really.

My want to try a P7 was purely to see what all the fuss was about, that and my 10 year old Stadium is getting a little long in the tooth. Once I’d tried it I was sold. hence my disappointment when it failed.

I’ll be running two tonight, one on the bars, and one on me lid, so look out for the bright glow coming from the Thetford area.

Hey, I’ve just been looking at the a!rbike light sold by 0n 0ne and it is an SSC-P7 in a flash holder with holder for 3 18650 cells.

So that blows the speculation that you can’t expect a normal P7 to stay the course if theyre selling them, bike specific with bar mount.

Is the a!rbike therefore, “just a cheap torch” that should be expected to fail? It is essentially the same product isn’t it?

it is, and it isn’t – I have both and whilst the LED is the same, the build quality on the airbike is far higher. I think that’s what’s been failing, rather than the LED itself.

One of my P7s failed too. Sent it back yesterday. I bought 4, two pairs. One a P7 C the other P7 D. It was one of the P7 Cs that failed after 1 ride. Their warranty procedure is good, so hoping for a quick turnaround.

Fantastic lights for the money. Bought as a stopgap, thinking that someone will bring out some mega cut price lights next year. However these are for keeps.

Thank for the recomendation.

went out with two last night, the new one that had arrived that day mounted on the bars switched off 3 times. I cam back on again but it did switch off.

The one mounted on my helmet worked fine..

Theres a message in that somewhere I think.. 😕

Stumpi, dont give up mate!

Ive gone through over 20 P7’s and the only one i had to send back was one i think i broke myself by shorting it when testing it.

Sometimes when you get the light, you have too tighten up the pill and just make sure the connection is good.
Take the lens cover and reflector out and use needle nose pliers to tighten/screw down the pill and when you’ve done that get a small screw driver and loosen then tighten up the screws to make sure the connection is good.
Now unscrew the switch (like you’re about to put a battery in) and see if it looks like anything is loose there.
It used to just be a bare spring, but now for some reason they put a cover over the spring and now its a round metal thingy which pushes down onto the spring and if this is loose, then the light will flicker.
Your light might be slightly different, but they usually copy each other.

Other than that, what batterys are you using, as the protected batterys are mm’s longer than the unprotected and sometimes you have to use a small magnet spacer to make them longer.
You can get them from DX or if that is the problem, then i have a couple spare i could send you.

Stick in there, they do work!!!!

Thanks Lightman,

The one I used on the bars last night was certainly a little rattley.. so I will give it the once over tonight as per..
FYI I use the protected cells, and yes, both mine have the metal cover over the spring in the end cap.

Dave

I just opened up my latest package from DX i got this morning, just after posting the above and its almost comical that as i was trying the lights out, one appeared to be DOA, but i went through the usual checks (as above) and the pill wasn’t tight enough, so i sorted that and everything worked fine!

The only thing ive noticed is that the last 7 lights ive received in the last few days, the current draw is not as high as my previous batch of lights i got about 4weeks ago,but i think this is a good thing as i think the older lights were putting out over 1200lumens and this batch is around 600-800, so the battery should last just that bit longer and to be honest, the older ones were just toooooo bright(if thats possible)!!!!!!!!!!

My P7 worked a treat up Cut Gate last night. Realised i’d forgotten to pack my hope HID so was stuck with just the P7. Seeing as it was all I had I attached it to my helmet and in the interests of preserving battery kept it in the low setting until we got to the top and then whacked it on the full setting for the way back down. Had a spare battery but never needed it, 1hr 50mins on one battery and more than enough light, certainly more than my HID alone. Fantastic conditions up there if a little cold (about -7), was like a toboggan run all the way down from the top but surprisingly grippy.

Funny you should say that Lightman, my second is certainly a little dimmer on every setting that the first one.

As you say, no bad thing as medium is plenty 90% of the time.

Glad you had a good first trip Richyb

One of the screws in the pill had come out and was rattling round behind the reflector, obviously why it wouldve been switching off I guess..

Hi

I’m running a 20w Halogen MR16 with an old cateye stadium NiCd pack which let me down last week so looking to move up.

Do you guys just use the mounts like these or is it a specific brand etc

Fleabay

How good is the battery life? Helmet mounts, do you just tiewrap them on?

I’m really tempted to get the ayups, but £230 is more than i can afford/justify at the moment I think.

Any suggestions would be helpful

Thanks

Lee

All the info you will needhere

For handlebar mounting i think the preference is Twofish Lockblock

That review is spot on, save for the fact that there is now a 5 mode version available, lo-med-high-flash-sos.

The handle bar mount DX sell is quite good, and at $3 is a brgain. I tried to order a lock block, but unless you order over a tenners worth they stick you for the postage.

Anyway,

Everything you need is here.

You need the torch $37.70 :- http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.12060
A pair of cells $10.00 :- http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.5790
Charger $ 8.44 :- http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.6105
Mains adaptor $ 2.13 :- http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.2709
Bar mount $ 3.35 :- http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.15642

Enjoy!