Coolcaringer Engineering

Coolcaringer Engineering - LED Caving Lamps.

LEDs are now a popular alternative to incandescent lamps in caving giving good light with reduced current consumption and hence increased battery duration - or the opportunity to reduce the size of the battery carried. There are many good lamps available from professional manufacturers such as Speleotechnics and www.ledcavinglamps.com and I'm not trying here to emulate their products - or their prices.

These lamps have been developed for my own use and having achieved some success and been asked by others about the lamps this website is the result. I do have some lamps for sale but please have a read through the text here and assess whether my lamps suit your needs. They are almost exclusively built up into recycled Oldham or Youle headsets and use Luxeon 1W LEDs in the 1 Watt version or 5mm discrete LEDs in the 2 Watt version. For power, I have used Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) or Lithium Ion (Li-Ion) batteries. I have also developed a range of chargers to run from both the AC mains or a vehicle supply.

My intention was to procuce a good, reliable light that would operate from a helmet mounted battery for 8 hours, the battery for which would be rechargeable and small enough that a spare could be carried.

Click here to read a load of waffle about the lamps.
Click here to go to the 1 Watt Lamp page
Click here to go to the 2 Watt Lamp page
Click here to find out about batteries and chargers
Click here for prices.
Click here for custom made lamps and batteries.
Click here for Oldham bulb replacement LED boards.

Update - June 2008
The 2 Watt lamp is up and running and I've made about 6 of them. The single push switch operation has 4 modes - Off, 10%, 50% and 100%.or 6 modes - Off, 10%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%. It's a software change to vary the number of steps. This gives the advantage of the Oldham's naturally more water resistant casing and variable output/brightness for increased battery duration. See the 2 Watt Lamp page.

Pictures of the Helmet Mounted Battery. I simply use a thick rubber band to secure the battery to the side of my caving helmet (left) and run the cable around the other side... see below right.