Originally Posted by Becca
Does anyone have a good recommendation for a 12v battery that can handle a Luxeon headlight with multiple LEDs in the tail light and turn signals, and give runtimes of at least two hours? (Three to five would be better, but I'm not gonna get greedy) I would actually prefer it not to fit in my bottle cage; other than that, what've you got?
I use an external Lithium-Ion portable DVD player battery. It's a silver block about the size of a softcover novel. The model I have is rated for 9V and 5400 mAh. With that much power, it can (theoretically) run my dual Luxeon emitters at 700mA for about 7.5 hours. Tail and signal lights wouldn't take that much power, you could probably run them on 250mA if you use some clever series/parallel combinations to avoid wasting power on resistors. With 950mA drawn, the battery would (again, theoretically) run for 5.5-6 hours.
Just go to eBay and do searches for "external portable DVD battery" and other combinations thereof. You can also buy them at Best Buy for more money. You'll find batteries in 7.2V, 9V and 12V variants, with differing mAh ratings. The great thing about these batteries is that they usually have LED charge indicators telling you how much juice is left, and come with both wall and car charger plugs.
Here, I've done the work for you. These are all identical to the model I have:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...775500023&rd=1
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...776683145&rd=1
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...775696689&rd=1