Advise me on my old HID light please!

[Globalti]

Yes, I know HID lights are old technology but this one has given me several years of great service and I'm reluctant to chuck it away if I can sort the battery.

I dropped the battery pack on a hard floor and must have damaged it because now, while discharging it gasses with a wet whistling noise. As far as I can ascertain from Trailtech a new battery pack would cost £92, although they were in some doubt that the new battery pack would work with that switch.

So what to do? Flog the lamp on Ebay and go LED? I want to do night road riding and occasional CX or MTB night rides.

Will the HID lamp fail soon anyway and leave me with a useless new battery?

Could I build a battery with bundled li-Ion batteries off the web? Or even replace the damaged cell in my existing pack?

What self-contained LED light do you recommend that can also be used for occasional DIY and around the house duties?

 

[fossyant]

Be careful if you open the pack. You've obviously got at least one faulty battery in there. Is that 14.8v ? If so then you can build your own pack with 18550 batteries or 26000 size. You would need 4 series 2 parallel as a mimimum (4 x 3.7v to give the 14.8, and 2 x parallel to give run time.

If you can open the pack, you may be able to replace batteries, but it will most likely need soldering.

To be frank, it's probably going to cost you a fair amount in batteries. You are looking at at least £6 each for quality Xtar or Senybor cells x 8 !

 

[cosmicbike]

If you are happy to use lithium polymer cells (same tech, just in a plastic case instead of metal like Li-Ion), have a gander at www.hobbyking.com It's aimed at RC models and I have used them extensively in my other hobby. You just was a 4S lipo of similar capacity, and given the use, their 'B' grade cells would be fine. You would need another charger though....

 

[lpretro1]

That looks like a horrendous thing to have to carry on your bike. LED technology is getting very good and there are some fab lights at great rices on the market

 

[cosmicbike]

I would hazard a guess, but something like this would be a cheap, well rated (so I've read, don't have one myself) replacement LED

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/4X-CREE-X...K_SportGoods_CyclAcces_RL&hash=item35cd8eda53

 

[andrew_s]

I'd recommend a new battery pack rather than trying to replace the duff cell in the old pack. The good old cells will have started to lose capacity, and adding a new cell with a higher capacity may well upset the ability of the charger to tell where "full" is.

If you replace with LED, you'll probably find that the light is less focused than with the HID, with a wider spread and less distance. On the other hand, you'll have a lot more ability to stretch out the run time, as LEDs work slightly better at low power than at full power, so it's normal to have several brightness modes, the lower of which might extend battery life by 2 -4 times. HID are pretty much full power only.
If you want self-contained, there are a lot of torches, and not that many lights that you would call a bike light. Exposure are the well-known brand in the UK, but they are fairly expensive.
Otherwise, there is a wide range of lights with a separate battery pack, ranging from cheap Chinese ebay specials such as that linked by cosmicbike, up to something brighter than a car headlight that will last for several hours. Quality control on the cheap ones is more or less completely lacking, so you could be unlucky. Shipping times from Hong Kong/China can be up to a month, so organising a replacement could be a bit of a pain. I'd probably go for something mid-range, like a Fenix HP20 2x18650.