More Olight Buffoonery

Things go in waves for me. I change my weekly obsessions…….errrrr……weekly. This week I am on a Battery Tester / Charger rampage. The battery world has some loose standards and most average personal opinions on batteries are limited to AA, AAA, or 9 volt. If you dig much deeper than that there is a lot more to be learned. I haven’t thought of Olight for ages. But now that I am reviewing batteries from a couple manufacturers on this blog I have tested every battery in the house. And as I stumbled across my old Olight flashlights I found that since most of them were 7 years old or older it is time to replace some of the batteries. I talked about their use of proprietary batteries here.

To charge the batteries in my Seeker 2 Pro you use the USB cable with the magnetic mount on it and attach the flashlight. That’s fine but when your battery is 7 years old and you wonder what its state is, the Olight charging system provides you ZERO feedback. Red light, green light.

So I fully charged them then put them in a proper tester to check their state.

THEIR STUPID PROPRIETARY SETUP WON’T ALLOW YOU TO JUST POP THEM IN A CHARGER. The positive pole of the battery is recessed behind an insulator.

The little silver button to the right of it is a small earth magnet. Slap that thing on the end of the battery and suddenly it fits in the charger and makes contact.

Cheating To Charge One

Now you can see the positive pole …….errrr…….magnet sticking up.

By the way my FULLY CHARGED Olight battery read 86% on two of my other battery testers and 90% on the other. Expensive ass battery that cuts off charging voltage before it is actually fully charged.

Fuck Olight

While I bought all those flashlights years ago I am keeping them. They are decent torches, some of them. They’ll serve you fine until the day that you realize it is time to start buying replacement batteries at ridiculously inflated costs.

The buyer needs to understand that they are buying into a system that doesn’t give the consumer choices. They want you to use only their batteries and only their charging system. Their charging system provides absolutely no useful information at all regarding battery health.

How’d you really NEED to use a battery in an emergency only to find out it was degraded and won’t hold up?

Wrap Up

Most battery uses are not critical. Your batteries in a TV remote are not critical and easy and cheap to replace.

However, that Police Officer NEEDS a bright flashlight that works. The fireman too. Search and Rescue personnel require dependable high power lights. And you do too if the SHTF.

It’s my opinion that your money is better spent on another flashlight ecosystem.