Solarstorm Battery Life Indicator

I have both an X2 and an X3 complete with fire hazard Chinese batteries which, for safety reasons, have to be charged outside overnight under the supervision of my 6 year old girl. This I can live with. What I find a bit annoying is not having any idea on either of the lights how much battery life is remaining.

When they are initially connected to the batteries they will show as fully charged, whether they are straight from the biscuit tin or reconnecting after using the previous day. The indicator will then fairly quickly drop to showing only a single bar of charge remaining but it will stay like this for hours. It causes me anxiety on night rides as I am constantly expecting to be suddenly plunged into darkness and, by extension, a tree.

I have no idea how the electronics in these kind of things work. Is the battery life monitoring circuitry in the light head unit or contained in the battery itself? Can you get third party battery monitors to sit between the head unit and the battery? Would better quality batteries solve this or do I just need to pay more than £15 for a decent set of lights?

Thanks.

That’s interesting… the battery indicator on my X2 stays on three lights for ages, then drops through two – one – flashing – darkness in no time at all.

So not only are the indicators useless, they’re also inconsistently useless…

Mine stay at 3 then turn off immediately – which can be colourful, …colour being the lights behind my eyes when crashing in pitch black. Nice to know mine are not faulty 😀

probably the battery thats gone.

Mine says 3 fullt charged. Drops almost instantly to two and then stays like that for hours. I thought it was the Chinese way?

This and the fact that I find night riding boring has led me to stop doing it

Dirty or loose/damaged connector at a guess. Mine sometimes does the same. A quick blow into the socket and a firm push and screw in and three lights pop back on.

It’s likely the battery as I have had reasonably accurate, proportional lights in the past. If the voltage tails off quickly but holds ‘enough’ to keep the main LEDs active it’d likely account for the weird display. Anyone with a quality battery pack (i.e. one of Smudges or homebrew with known good cells) could prove that one way or other, I’ve just used a cheap one for a season and replaced when it fails on me (don’t night ride much these days).

Yes, as per brassneck ^. I had that issue, although the battery life wasn’t great anyway- less than 1hr on full. So swapped to a Torchy battery pack and now get long run-times and an accurate battery indicator display.

I had one with “interesting” info from the lights on the original battery that it was supplied with – three lights for a bit (from fully charged), then two lights for a bit, as you’d expect, then one light for a millisecond followed by darkness.

When replaced with a torchy battery the lights all behaved as one might have expected (i.e. giving a realistic picture of remaining juice).

Buy the batteries and battery case, a separate charger with a status indicator.

Or you can use a multimeter to check charge.

Bought myself the battery cradle and just need the batteries and charger.

My Hope Vision used to just switch off too, you have to be careful!

Bought two X2s with dodgy battery packs. One will show three greens for a 10mins then down to one quickly after and will stay like that for 2 hours before dying. The other is more even in its progression from 2 to 0, but it also drops off from 3 after around 30mins. I reckon its just shite batteries, torchy is going to get an order for 2 new 4cell packs as soon as he has some in.

Anyone got a link to whatever batteries I would need from torchy? Can’t seem to find a sales section on his website?

Battery: 18650 (4 I think).

The plastic battery holder you can buy is waterproof and also has a USB outlet to charge accessories. Cost me a tenner.

Looking for the batteries and a charger too soon.

Let us know how you get on!

Ok I’ve just used Amazon to order an universal charger and 18650 batteries.

My X2 solar storms came with a good battery pack but the charger is a bit unimpressive?

I’ve got 2 plastic battery containers.

Altogether around £40 but I don’t use eBay.

The basic systems generally meter the battery based on voltage, but due to QC of the batteries and electronics YMMV. It is tricky to monitor based on voltage anyway to do this though the battery voltage profile for Li-ion is pretty flat for most of it’s profile and varies based on the load.

As per chart below the 0.5C (2 hour) curve is generally similar to high setting and 0.2C the low setting. The former is likely to sit at 1 bars for half the burn and the latter sit at 3 bars until the battery is close to depleted.

Could just run two lights/battery packs so if one dies the other will get you home.

Torchy is big_f_d_d (or similar) on ebay.
The other good place is smudge at mtb batteries.

Cheers.

Twisty – that makes kinda sense to me but does mean that a new quality battery probably won’t really help as the cheap head unit electronics may not be sophisticated enough to pick up on the small voltage drops. The trouble with waiting till the battery runs out is that it could happen at a quite inconvenient moment.

I have battery boxes from ebay, but with proper batteries in, and the head unit indicator still behaves as you describe. Don’t think I’ve ever seen the two light status. So prob the circuitry as you say. Lifetime is good though so NEA.

Bloody hell. 2 of my questions answered without me asking. My SS original battery drops from 3 to 1 bar rapidly, lasts for 2 hours on that then just goes off. Just tried to order another of Torchys to find nothing on ebay. So he hasn’t got any. Hmm.

Was talking to torchy early last week, said he was getting more 4 and 6 cell rubber wrapped packs in in a couple of weeks. So soon if that rings true.