Looking for new rental lights for dive shop

[diddler]

All,

Poking around through all the posts in this forum I haven't yet found the answer I'm looking for. Most posts are for people looking for their own personal use and are either looking for cheap and "bright enough", or expensive and wicked bright, most other requirements take a back seat. I work at a dive shop in Thailand and most if not all the shops have other issues with the commonly available flashlights for diving. I have a small set of unique, but reasonable requests for torches here at our shop.

First, rechargeable would be nice. Currently we use rather large "stick" style lights that take 4 "D" batteries. Well, more correctly, we've been renting the lights we need for specific dives till we find a working solution for our own shop. For this reason, we've been buying brand new (but very cheap and cheaply made) non-alkaline D's as we rent the lights. Investing in removable batteries with external chargers would be an option, but I'm wondering about others.

Specifically, I'm interested in lights that can be recharged externally or at least without disassembly. I know I've seen (but can't remember where) lights that have a small recharge port on the outside, covered and protected by a small, o-ring sealed thumb screw. Seem to recall that even if that plug were to leak it wouldn't flood the body of the light, but it might corrode the contacts a bit. This would be near ideal, I've dealt with some other large rechargeable lights that required disassembly (unscrew and remove bezel, bulb and reflector assembly and disconnect battery harness) and we had no end of problems with poor electrical connections, and no way of knowing if the charger was actually doing anything when plugged in. A small simple barrel style charge port seems a great idea. Short of something fancy like a inductive charger (ala my Sonicare electric toothbrush) I can't think of a better way to charge. A charge indicator light would be nice too, not charge level, simply whether or not the unit is charging when plugged in.

Cost is a concern, as we'd be buying multiple units at once, figure a range of 4 -12 units. Blazing output and optimum light patterns are not crucial, generally the people using these lights would be doing their first (or first few) night dives and wouldn't recognize the difference between a good light and a great light.

Reliability is very high on the list. We really DON'T want these things shutting off on students underwater at night, regardless of the number of spares we're carrying. Perhaps the most common problem all of the local shops have are lights that turn off at random underwater, or work when assembled back at the shop but then fail to turn on at jump time. Magnetic switches (or similar) would be nice but not a requirement.

Size is not terribly important, within reason. We've carted around some large, bulky lights before, we don't like them much but there aren't many complaints either.

I have a personal affinity for LED lights, all of my personal flashlights are LED. I like not having to worry about bulbs burning out, and the long burn time. Usually a bit more expensive but I think its worth the extra cost.

So, what do you think? Anything you can recommend that fits the bill?

Thanks!

Ryan

[mbsub]

Hi Ryan,

if the charging procedure so important for you, please have a look to our BASE. This lamp must not be open for charging and for this lamp exist a bar with 5 charging stations (see picture).
More details about the BASE you will find here: mb-sub.com: BASE
For each lamp you have a light indicator for the charging status. For the bar with the 5 units you get one common power supply.

Maybe this is a solution for your problem

Michael

[diddler]

Attractive lights, and they appear quite innovative. Can't find a price for them though, looks like a fair bit of quality machined aluminum, and thats usually not so cheap! All the dimming features would be a waste on our students and the 55 minute burn time with a halogen light isn't ideal either, we can do hour + night dives here, tack on a few minutes during testing, entry in water/swimming to dive site, exiting.... Likely we'd need more time than that. Thanks for the info though!

[diddler]

So, a little poking around on the web hasn't produced any relatively inexpensive torches with external charging. Color me surprised.

So, that might be a feature I'll have to do without. Just for the sake of argument, what is the least expensive scuba light available that could be considered a "primary light"?

[mbsub]

I think a lamp with external charging and with plastc housing you will not find. External charging is a feature of high quality lamps and not from "chinese rubbish".

Michael

[gcbryan]

I would think for a rental application in the conditions that you dive in and with the typical diver you are renting to the standard UK 4 C cell led light would be a good choice. You could also use standard rechargeable batteries with a standard charger.

Depending on how many night dives you are doing (how often) it might be better to just buy alkaline C cells in bulk. At least they don't go out mid-dive. With rechargeable batteries this isn't a problem if you are going to be constantly charging batteries but most dive shops around here simply use regular alkaline batteries for their rental lights.

A C4 eled or a C8 eled are a little bulky but it's the kind of light that most of your divers will own anyway. With a C8 you really don't have to change the batteries often and plastic in a rental light is probably a good thing.

Anyone who is really into lights isn't going to be renting a light anyway.

It seems like an obvious solution so if I've missed something obvious please excuse me.