Some IMPORTANT Things
Your Mother Never Told You About HID Lights
- Please don’t turn your light off before the bulb has the opportunity to fully warm up to operating
temperature, or turn it on again before it has properly cooled down. Once activated, all HID
bulbs need a full 60 seconds to warm up to operating temperature. If you turn it off before this
(called "short striking"), you cause damage to the bulb. Similarly, you cause damage to the bulb if
you turn it on before it has cooled down (called "hot striking"). All HID bulbs are particularly
fragile during warm up and cool down, so take care not to jar the bulb during this period. We
suggest turning the light on after you enter the water and turning it off a minute before you exit.
- NiMH batteries do not develop a memory. However, new NiMH batteries need several charge
and discharge cycles before they will deliver their full burn time rating. During the first two
or three cycles the burn times may be as short as 30 to 60 minutes. After a few cycles the batteries
will perform normally, and it may take a few more cycles before they have been conditioned
enough to reach peak performance. The typical battery charging time is about 60 minutes for a
conditioned 4500 mA battery that was used to power a 10W light for two hours.
- When preparing to charge your battery, always plug the battery into the charger and THEN
plug the charger into the wall. If you do it the other way, the charger will indicate with a solid
green light that it charged the battery but it really didn’t. A charging battery can get quite warm,
although not so hot it would burn you if you touched it.
- Recharge your battery if it hasn’t been used in one or two months. NiHM batteries slowly
discharge just sitting idle on the shelf, and will be permanently damaged if allowed to deep
discharge. For this reason you should also recharge a battery as soon as reasonable after use.
However, there is no point to leaving your batteries on the charger for extended periods. Once the
charger completes a recharging cycle, it will not charge again until reset by being turned off.
- DON’T FORGET THE CANISTER O-RING!!!! Many floods occur because the user stored
the lid o-ring separate from the light and forgot to put it back in place before they assembled the
light. "Out of sight out of mind." Put the O-ring where you will see it when you begin to
reassemble your light for the next dive. For the Wreck and Slimline canister lights, the O-ring
does not require lubrication. The most important thing is the O-ring should be CLEAN.
- After you burn your new light a few times, you may see a very slight ’fog’ of moisture form on the
lens when you turn it off and it cools. The fog on the lens is normal and if you do nothing it will
eventually go away. (Note the words ’slight fog’; actual moving drops of water indicate a flood.)
This is just moisture leached from brand new materials used inside the head and atmospheric
moisture trapped in the light head when it was assembled. We don’t recommend opening the
head, but if the fog really bothers you then remove the lens (see the manual to learn how), clean
the lens with nail polish remover (aka acetone), and reassemble.
- The ’notch’ on the inside front edge of the MR11 head is normal. The notch is not a chip or
crack and was intentionally added to aid in removal and replacement of the retaining O-ring.
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