Nearly bought a 9 LED pocket one from Tesco today for £5 but decided it would probably be cheaper on Ebay and took it back to the aisle. £1.60 ish with free postage on Ebay when I got home and looked. Are they any good though or do you need more LEDs? There are 25 LED ones for under a fiver.
As a general rule I find I get far better value for my (around) £5 purchase from China via Ebay. You might have to wait for it, although I have recieved stuff recently from HK in under a week.
Same thing £1 from Poundland (and the 25 LED ones).
Something to be aware with these that they rely on the internal resistance of the batteries to limit the current. The 9 LED ones don't last long with fresh alkalines. Best to use cheap Zinc Chloride cells.
Chris K
My limited experience is that multi-LED ones are not as good as single.
I guess it depends rather on what you want it for - but a focussed beam is more readily achievable with a single-LED source.
The more modern ones have a single LED array.
Now I'm confused.
Possibly much longer, or not at all, if the item also contains a battery.
or
Note: this is not a recommendation of the product or seller - it's just the first seller I found to have a photo of the LED.
And they are much better because they have a focussed beam. About a tenner at CPC. Excellent. However, there's a bad apple:
"to CPC Sales
Hello there,
LA03430 is an LED torch. I ordered one on March 13th. It was dispatched that day and it is absolutely fine. I ordered a second one on 13th July but it wasn?t dispatched until 16th October. When I tried it, it gave only a very poor light; nowhere near as good as the first torch. This was with the batteries from the old torch that it was intended to replace. When I tried it with the batteries in the torch I bought on March 13th it was slightly better but still not very bright. I concluded that it would only work with fresh batteries, which was a bit of a downer, but I bought two new D cells and tried them. They made the torch very bright indeed but only for about ten seconds. It then failed and thereafter would not work at all. It seems to me that the voltage regulation in the torch is faulty. I notice that the design is slightly different to that of the torch bought on the 13th March. That torch gives pretty much the same brightness no matter which set of batteries I try.
Given the long delay in getting the faulty torch, and the fact that the design is different, I?m wondering if the whole of the new batch is the same. For that reason I?d prefer a credit note rather than an exchange."
Bill
I have a single 7W cree LED in mine for about £4. It flattens a single lithium AA sized battery in less than 30 minutes but its really bright and warms the hand.
I watched a series of You Tubes from bloke in the USA converting outside ni ghtlights that he could get from a dollar shop. They came with a PV charger and battery. He removed the battery put in a different circuit or mutilate d the original and added a condenser.
Over a period of about an year he went from small (but impressive) improvem ents to something probably very worth having. He was appealing for crowd fu nding but never made enough to get a business going.
Pity that:
I bought a dozen "generator" torches for almost nothing, for presents for g randkids. There was a handle to squeeze that appeared to charge up a batter y or capacitor. But I discovered that the torches would run for many months without "charging". Then one fell apart, so I had a good look inside. Ther e were three non-rechargeable button cells inside. Once those went flat the torch was next to useless. The generator gave a short pulse of light, mayb e enough so I could go looking for a decent torch. So the generator torches are a scam.
Not all of them. I've bought a couple in the past that did work as advertised. Until the wire from the generator to the accumulator came loose...
A CREE or Luxeon single led torch is what you need if you are after brightness at the expense of battery life.
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I use rechargeables in my Poundland torches
+1, and as others have said I have had no problems with eBay ones from China. They seem to be very well made, and battery life is excellent.
Careful you don't end up in another Machine Mart debacle. B-)
I always go for a refund that isn't going to have an expiry date and the money is with me not them so I'm not tied to "spending" with that company.
We had one as a christmas present from somebody. My wife was very pleased with it till we realised the same thing - it's got a battery in it, and the windy thing does bugger all.
It's a single die LED, not an array.
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