Intermittent Green Force-HELP

[divertim]

I have a Green Force 50w HID umbilical which has started working intermittently, and has become a liability.

Where can I get good advice (here for instance?) on what might be causing it, and what can I do to repair it? It's worked perfectly for well over two years.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

Tim Saville

[Rod]

Try contacting the importers. I have heard very good things about their customer service.

[DIVE BUDDHA]

hi ya tim
if your having problems mate with any greenforce product drop rob lumb a line !
they are the distributors for greenforce in the uk also rob is a member of yd so it will be easy to contact him.
just out of intrest tim what is the torch doing to make it work intermitantly ?
best wishes leigh

[stevechesh]

have a look at the battery contacts, in particular, the contact that runs up the side of the battery and meets the top near the + side. Mine started to wear out a bit, so i put a few blobs of solder on the - (negative) contact to beef it up a bit. I've not had a problem with either of them since.

Also, unscrew the head from the umbilical and look at the metal contact 'ring' on the umbilical side particularly. My mate had some corrosion on his the other weekend which stopped it firing up. Once he'd cleaned the corrosion off (which was only light surface corrosion) it fired up first time with no more problems to date...

[Paul Oliver]

My old one an o ring in the bottom of the battery housing sorted out the lose connection by pushing it up a bit, not the same model as yours though.

Rob Lumb is on YD, have a look through the membership and drop him a PM

[Ian@1904]

Roy Lumb advised me to clean the contacts. If no joy ring Lumb Bros and if necessary send it in to them.

I have had minor issues getting my HID Impact to fire up, but clean contacts seems to have sorted this out.

[Dave Crampton]

You haven't said exactly what you have so I'll describe what happened to me.

I owned an Arrow 12 with umbilical and light head (not important which). My torch started to give symptoms similar to those you describe. Turn it on, on the surface fine, turn on in the water, and it would not work, leave it turned on and later it would come on on its own. Then it might turn off on its own later still.

I phoned Rob at Lumb Bros. He said that if you charge the Arrow type Batteries direct to the battery pack the act of screwing and unscrewing in the charging adapter over time compresses the battery. The battery is made up of 'comercial' standard size C cells, shrink-wrapped and with a metal strip added to bring the neg battery contact to the top.

Rob told me to place a tap washer in the bottom of the battery case, to bring the battery up loser to the top of the case, to negate the compression, which had occured. Then in future charge through the umbilical so the compression would not happen again. Its important top use a tap washer, as the bottom end of the battery pack has a valve on to let gas escape when the charging process occurs. The batteries give off gas when charged I believe and this valve allows over preasure to escape.

This affect of compression does not happen with the FII & FIII battery packs apparently .

[2_dive]

You might find that the cable on the umbilical has broken near one end - I had this problem. The ends on the umbilical are a bit of a pain to take apart but it can be done and the cable shortened.

Dave

[Marky Mark]

I'd agree with DaveC, all my troubles stopped when I started charging from the umbilical, not the battery pack.

[divertim]

Thanks everybody, I'm obviously not the only one with problems, it does sound like a compression problem as the contacts look clean. The tap washer solution sounds like the best bet. I hope this doesn't mean a trip to B&Q where I'll have to buy a bag of 50.

Need this sorting, diving the Clyde this weekend.

Cheers

Tim