Begin shameless commercial plug!Regular users of this site will know I flog the StenLight - and will (hopefully) also know that I keep any commercial postings to a minimum!
The loooooooooong wait for the revised StenLight and the new battery box is finally over!
You'd be forgiven for thinking I'd given up. Quite the opposite. I only took the existing products off the market because I knew new and revised equipment was on its way. Caving and mine exploring is a small market and I wasn't going to sell people equipment I knew full well would be replaced or upgraded soon. I'd rather lose some sales than a reputation!
Unfortunately it took rather longer - about 12 months longer - for the new kit to be ready than I'd been told it might.
Anyhow, in a nutshell, the changes are:
Lamp:http://www.stenlight-caving.co.uk/product/stenlight-s7-led-caving-lamp/ New, much tougher, round-section cable (replacing the cable remains a 60 second DIY job)
Uprated emitters; Luxeon Rebel ES
Sten have stuck with Luxeon (Philips Lumileds) because of their extremely good reliability and consistency. We're not trying to compete with the brightest lamps on the market.
Peak output is 500 lumens on Turbo (measured - not a theoretical maximum based on driving the emitters at 100% with no thermal or optical loss) with a run-time of 3 hours on Turbo. In practice, with thermal limiting kicking it should average around 400 lumens continuous and 4.5 hours run time on Turbo. I won't go into full specifications here because it's a lot to read and they are on the web site if you want them.
The revised lamp head is fully compatible with old batteries, old chargers and all the accessories.
Battery:http://www.stenlight-caving.co.uk/product/stenlight-small-waterproof-battery/ The battery is the area most people asked for improvements and is a total re-design.
The new battery is a rigid,injection moulded ABS box. It has a removable lid (held in place by 6 screws), with an o-ring seal to make it waterproof to 20' / 7m (same as the lamp). It uses the same cable as the revised lamp and has a strain relief guide at the cable exit. The cells are from Samsung, are 1.25Ah each (giving 2.5Ah total), they are protected cells and are tab-soldered. Should a cell degrade it will be easy for us to service the battery packs or entirely practical as a DIY job if you're happy making a couple of soldered joints.
The new battery is fully compatible with the old charger and all generations of lamp.
End of shameless commercial plug!
my orders are to sit here and watch the world go by