I recently bought a Shadowhawk S9322 flashlight that has a Shadowhawk-branded battery included. The label on the battery says "over charge and discharge protection" and "Rechargeable battery with PCB", which somehow seems to indicate it's a PCB-protected battery, right?
And yet, the battery is a flat-top type and only 70 mm long, while allegedly containing PCB circuitry and having 5000 mAh capacity. I wonder how these specs fit together. I did lengthy and repeated research, but all PCB-protected 21700 cells I found are way longer (74-75mm) and have a button top. A 70mm, flat-top, PCB-protected cell simply does not seem to exist.
Also worth noting: The cheapest PCB-protected 21700s I can find are only $1-$2 cheaper than the complete flashlight (when it's "on sale" at Amazon). This further indicates that the cell isn't a protected one.
All this wouldn't be a big problem if those Shadowhawk cells were available separately, but they aren't. So if I need a replacement, I wouldn't be able to fit a 74-75 mm long PCB button-top cell into the flashlight, and neither would I want to use an unprotected cell if the flashlight requires PCB-protected cells.
Does anyone know more about these cells? Is the PCB labelling just a marketing scam, or did they cheat on the capacity to make the PCB circuitry fit into 70 mm? Or is there a third reasonable explanation I didn't think of?
by ChristophBerger
4 Comments
Doesn’t look like it’s protected and probably more like 2500mAh. Can you show us a picture of the terminals? Shadowhawk is usually seen as scam.
” it is GREEN” , wtf is that supposed to mean? 😉
As u/UndoubtedlySammysHP says, Shadowhawk is a bit of a scam and I wouldn’t trust these batteries.Â
70mm? Definitely not.
I can’t think of many decent lights that *require* protected batteries, though I can think of a few where oversized batteries fit better than normal ones. Personally, I have a few reasons to actively avoid them beyond simply not fitting most lights.
Shadowhawk simply lied.