The brightness of car headlights is generally around 1,000 lumens but this YouTuber named Samm Sheperd made a fully homemade LED flashlight at 72,000 lumens. With lots of parts, some handy skills, and a little hard work you can make a monstrous flashlight for yourself.
Lumen is a measure of the total visible light emitted by a light source that can be seen by the human eye. The brighter the light source, the more its value in lumens. The following chart will give you an idea of brightness as measured in lumens.
The floodlights used in sports stadiums can go up to 100,000 lumens or even higher. Knowing those can brighten an entire football or cricket field, you can imagine what your DIY 72,000-lumen flashlight can do. The video documents every detail of how to make the flashlight, including the online sources where you can get the parts.
The flashlight uses eight LED chips rated at 100W and 9,000 lumens. All of these were connected in parallel to achieve the 72,000-lumen flashlight. If you ever made the mistake of touching a working light bulb, you would know how hot it can get. Using eight of 100W chips will dissipate too much heat, requiring a proper cooling system. Samm Sheperd incorporated a cooling system with the flashlight. You can get the list of all the necessary materials from the YouTube video description.
The humungous light holds no comparison to an ordinary flashlight rated at 5,000 lumens or even a bright LED torch at 1,050, and the comparisons show the same. The only concern is overheating of the flashlight and Samm has answered his followers that it won’t overheat, ” it can run off a power supply continuously with a stable coolant temperature.” With something so powerful, the power supply needs to be strong, but small batteries like the one Samm used do not last long. He said in the video description, “The small battery back I’m using is made out of batteries I already had, and they will last 6 minutes. A bigger battery is easy.”
If you want one and have no interest in building one, you can order one with Samm at $700. Not a bad deal, but you might need to consider better battery options because 6 minutes is no good even for $700 only.
