increase bulb wattage in headlight

In article <[email hidden]>, [email hidden] says...

Quoted message said:

While fiddling with my Sigma Sport headlights, I noticed that one of the bulbs looks like a
standard halogen 20w bulb (bulk encased in bell-shaped housing). Made me think I can swap in a
higher wattage bulb for either the 5w or 20w bulb (I'd probably try a 10w and 30w) to increase the
brightness.

Is there any reason I shouldn't do this? Obviously the battery runtime would decrease, but that's
ok since I top off the battery after every 45-min commute.

You might overheat the housing and/or reflector, causing them to distort (or even melt if it's
severe enough(. Then again, you might not; it depends on what the housing is designed to handle.

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Dave Kerber Fight spam: remove the ns_ from the return address before replying!

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David Kerber said:

In article <[email hidden]>, [email hidden] says...

Quoted message said:

While fiddling with my Sigma Sport headlights, I noticed that one of the bulbs looks like a
standard halogen 20w bulb (bulk encased in bell-shaped housing). Made me think I can swap in a
higher wattage bulb for either the 5w or 20w bulb (I'd probably try a 10w and 30w) to increase
the brightness.

Is there any reason I shouldn't do this? Obviously the battery runtime would decrease, but that's
ok since I top off the battery after every 45-min commute.

You might overheat the housing and/or reflector, causing them to distort (or even melt if it's
severe enough(. Then again, you might not; it depends on what the housing is designed to handle.

Yes overheating is the only risk really. There is another solution though and that is to overvolt
the bulbs by 10-20% this will decrease the lifespan to maybe only 10% of the nominal life. But since
that is maybe 2000 hours already you can get away with a lot of riding at 200 hours. The benefit of
doing this is that the same bulb will emit a much stronger and whiter light. I plan on upping the
small bulb to 6W + overvolting and go down to maybe 15W and overvolting the spotlight. This will
give me a very much stronger flood light and about the same strength spotlight. Please observe. I
haven't done this yet just planning to. If it doesn't work I'll just have to buy a new bulb and take
the extra cell off the batterypack.

Of course overvolting this setup with the standard SLA battery cannot be done. In order to acheive
this I am putting together 6 NiMh cells at 1.2V each this will give me 7.2V which is 20%
overvolting. Many bikelight manufacturers do this already, mostly by only 10%. Like putting an extra
cell into a 12V system making it 13.2V.

--
Perre

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