No, mine ran for hours at a time. Well, technically the most I ever ran it at a time is a bit over an hour, but I ran it probably 3 hours between charges. I had I think a 14.4 volt NiMH water bottle battery, but that fried the ballast in the HID in 30 minutes (since it puts out > 16 volts when freshly charged) so I built a switching voltage regulator for it, and after that had no problems.