Before we jump to the video I wanted to share some observations about the halogen bulbs. They are insanely bright, equally as hot, and eat your battery for a afternoon snack. I had not given any thought to the heat these bulbs would generate. After just a few minutes with the scanner on, the bar is almost too hot to touch and definitely too hot to hold comfortably. It is so hot that it honestly has me concerned about safety while operating the scanner in the summer.
I searched online for others who may have had issues with heat or documented how hot these scanners get, but I could not find anything. I decided to take some temperature readings of the bar at five minute intervals while in use over a period of 15 minutes. I took these temperature readings with an infrared temperature gun in our heated garage. The temperature in the garage was 61°F with 24% humidity. Here are the results:
Scanner State | Temperature |
Powered Off | 60°F |
Five minutes of runtime | 167°F |
Ten minutes of runtime | 178°F |
Fifteen minutes of runtime | 189°F |
Five minutes powered off | 112°F |
Ten minutes powered off | 95°F |
Fifteen minutes powered off | 86°F |
You can clearly see that the bar gets quite hot and the temperature was continuing to climb. I stopped the experiment at 15 minutes. The drain on the battery after just 15 minutes of use is considerable. I would not want to let it run more than 20 minutes without having the car running.
I love the look of the halogen powered scanner, but I am not happy with the how hot it gets and how hard it is on the battery. I have ordered some halogen replacement LEDs and capacitors to help simulate the fade out. I will be doing a couple more videos comparing the LEDs versus the halogens.
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