this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2025
20 points (95.5% liked)
flashlight
3316 readers
3 users here now
Portable illumination
Rules:
- Be excellent to each other
- Don't be the reason we need to make more rules
Related:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Sometimes baby steps are how we make progress. In the field of consumer gadgetry, said progress is often driven forward by selling objectively silly things to nerds with disposable income. Remember, in fact, how back in the late 90s and very early 2000s there were still Very Intellectual people on forums going on about how LED flashlights were just a distraction. A mere expensive curiosity for yuppies who didn't know any better, they'll never be able to achieve decent price/brightness/color, and obviously everyone knows that high powered little quartz halogen bulbs are where it's at for anyone who wants a flashlight with a truly studly output. They're what the cops use, after all. Clowns who spent a lot of money on LED lights only wound up with novelty gimmicks like this.
Uh-huh. That table turned pretty quickly.
Up until now, lots of people have been saying, "Yeah, yeah. Wake me up when sodium ion is an actual viable product." Myself included, probably. Well, here we are. (Maybe.)
This thing isn't a form factor I'm interested in or have much of a use case for, but since current sodium ion cells have a significantly lower capacity per volume than lithium ion a big ol' baseball bat of a flashlight is probably the ideal proportion for this kind of thing.
I'm kind of liking the form factor.
Having grown up with mag lite being the new consumer thing that actually worked, there's something to having a beefy light in your hand.
Wurkkos TS27 has an LFP battery and is beefy and advertised as a duty light, and it seems nice except then it has this silly RGB ring light that turns it into a fidget toy. I lost interest because of that. YMMV. :)
https://wurkkos.com/products/ts27
Added: I just looked over the kickstarter page for this light. The battery looks to be 10,000mAH nominal, size 32140 which is 4.7x the volume of a 21700. Voltage is 3.0 nominal but looking at the discharge curve at -20C it looks about 2.5V on average, so 25 WH. Not that much better than a 5000mAH 3.6V 21700 (18WH). The sodium is somewhat worse but still viable at -40C and I guess it might be beating lithium by then too, plus it has the ability to accept charging at -40C. I don't see super-cold charging as very important for a flashlight (if you're able to charge your light you can probably keep it at least a little bit warm), though super cold operation can be helpful.
Also, this is a 2500 lumen light which is a far cry from the old Maglights that were perfectly usable. The classic 2AA minimag was around 5 lumens over most of its runtime, the huge 6D was something like 36 lumens, and the nicad powered Magcharger was about 180 lumens. Surely for changing a fuse, a low powered headlamp is preferable to a huge handheld ;).
Sodium batteries are mostly of interest for grid storage or maybe stationary home batteries once they get cheap enough. They are sort of marginal for EV's but might find a place in some cold weather ones. Having them in a few weird flashlights isn't going to help ramp up manufacturing volume compared to that. The real demand will come from power utilities buying gigawatts at a time, not a few flashlight nerds.
I remember the Eternalight and it went through a few nicer incarnations over time The designer was a regular on Candlepower Forums. IDK if the company still exists. The product was cool in some ways. IIRC it uses 5mm leds. The first production flashlight with a Luxeon was the Arc LS and I had two of them. I think the semi-custom McLux TK may have been earlier but my memory by now is hazy. I still have mine. Sodium batteries are different. Aside from the very niche advantage in cold weather charging, they are worse in every way than lithium. The main feature that makes them interesting is potentially lower cost per KWH in the long run. That's great if you want a 100KWH off-grid battery for home, and maybe it can find its way into economy EV's. But nerdy flashlights, nah, battery costs are not much of an issue already. The bigger light and fancier charging and regulation circuitry negate any advantage. We could already use LFP batteries if we wanted to, but we almost never do.