Battery Worries

I was an early adopter of red-dot sights.

I've had this AimPoint 1000 since 1991 or 1992.

It's bounced around from gun to gun.  My Mini-14 on a B-Square side mount.  FuzzyGeff's Bushmaster M17S.  Marv's first AR.  Harvey's Ruger 10/22 (shown here).

Two 357 size batteries gave it about a 100 hour run time, and I ran through a lot of batteries by forgetting to turn it off.  It's been rode hard and put away wet a few times and never failed.  Made me trust the brand.

That might have been a problem in a home defense scenario, but I used my Glock 21 or Remington 870 for that back then.  They had tritium sights.

No lights neither!  Gives your position away!

I've changed my mind on a lot of things over the years.

It ticks me off to have to just throw away otherwise perfectly good sights every 10 years or so because the tritium has worn out.

I have lights on the home defense guns now.

But batteries?

Aimpoints get years of battery life now.  8 years or so on my M4S.  It's on its third battery since I bought it.  It's been banged around a bit and survived a carbine course.  The Army issues them!  If it was junk then Privates, Specialists and Lance Corporals would have proven they're junk by now.

Even red-dots from the former Soviet Union have good battery lives.  I did a series on the BelOMO PK-01VS.  The 400 hour rating for the single AA battery made it a year without shutting down.  This optic has survived a fall from about 3 feet onto terrazzo when the nail the gun was hanging from quit.  No change in zero, no obvious breakage.

The StrikeFire II is supposed to have an 80,000 hour life, but it shuts off after 12 hours, meaning I constantly have to remember to turn it on.

The 29,000 hour life of the MicroPrism has an auto-shutoff too, but it also has a shake-awake so it comes back on without me having to remember anything.

So far, the only two optics I've managed to hurt have been the StrikeFire II which lost zero from a fall from the bed and I thoroughly killed FuzzyGeff's 4-12x40 Bushnell Sportsman by dropping it off the range table to the concrete.

The only one that completely died is the one that has no illumination at all!  Irony!