Upgrade Your Flashlight to an LED Flashlight

It's time to breathe new life into aging incandescent flashlights. Installing LEDs can make your flashlight brighter and improve its battery life by a factor of up to 50 times.

The difficulty with transforming conventional flashlights is their voltage. Typically 3V does not provide enough voltage to power the bright white LEDs. That's why most commercial LED products use three 1.5V batteries. You can still get a useful and efficient flashlight by using amber-colored LEDs.

If you have a flashlight that puts out more than 3V, spring for the brighter white LEDs.

Step 1 Getting access to the cathode and anode leads

You could try removing the bulb and trying to solder some wires in place yourself, but the bulb's casing does it all for you in a very convenient way.

Don't hesitate to take a hammer to it since the bulb won't be useful to us anymore. Be sure to place the bulb inside a rag so that glass don't go flying.

Having access to the leads made it easy to solder an LED directly into place. Make sure that you don't solder with the wrong polarity. The positive terminal will always be adjacent to the notch in the bulb's casing.

Comments

[xman2]

thank you

[ariekaptein]

@ Soksume; If you want to be the english teacher, you better do it right; you should omit the "n" as well; >> a LED-Flashlight

[Meadman83]

That would work if you pronounce LED as if it were the word led (as in "I led my dog on its leash"). Most will say ell-eee-dee, as an acronym for Light Emitting Diode, so "an LED flashlight' is fine.

[Meadman83]

Thanks for a walk down memory lane, used to do this in high school electronics shop back in the mid 70's. Used to get our LEDs at Radio Shack, back when you could actually buy stuff to build stuff there.

[Soksume]

you should take the "d" off the title to be "Upgrade Your Flashlight to an LED Flashlight"