let’s talk bike lights!
winter is cold and dark up here so i end up doing a lot of my training on trails and rail paths. current set up consists of a 650 lumen usb on the bar and another ~100 lumen helmet lamp. want to replace the helmet light with one of these. remarkable how much these things have come down in cost in just a few years.
anyone else like to creep at night?
Great another thread to ramble about dyno lights in
yes i do
I think this thread can be reserved for sensible battery light folk.
I just got one of those 9 lights fax machine was selling. I’m pretty excited because my old light had a bad battery. It would just go and say it’s good and then be dead.
The problem is at this point I can’t consider using battery lights sensible
Cheap usb charging tail lights are so damn good these days, I can’t believe all we had were PB superflashes not even a decade ago, and now I can get something brighter, smaller, and rechargeable for a couple bucks on ebay. Headlights have obviously come a long way too but I don’t think theres a cheapo analogue the way there is for taillights.
I have I think at least a half dozen of these, you can find them even cheaper if you look. Plenty bright for city riding, strap a few on if you’re nervous.
yeah? why is that?
what does your setup consist of?
I’m starting to think that dedicated battery lights run off of a compact but potent battery is a pretty good option for 2-4 hour training rides. There’s definitely a rising contintent in ultra-distance racing that is eschewing dynamo setups in favor of a 20k mAh battery tossed in a small frame bag. The logic is that you can plug in and recharge whenever you stop for food or water. It’s not a solution for, say GDMTR or something, but probably works for 180 minutes of thrashing around on Canadian singletrack
Battery lights work better if you’re good at a preflight & postflight routine. Riding a lot in the evenings + not being good at a checklist led to me discovering more than once that my headlight or taillight wasn’t headlighting or taillighting any more, followed by a slow slink back home on quiet streets & sidewalks.
I love riding at night. It can add a real sense of adventure to what would otherwise be a boring commute or exploratory loop.
Like 15 years ago I had a bad experience with a couple different Cygolites not living up to their advertised runtimes/brightness and since I’m a flashlight nerd I’ve just been using high end flashlights on the front since then.
I like them because I can go on candlepowerforums and look at the runtime graphs as well as find the FL-1 specs and figure out what I want. Bike lights, like headlamps, seem to prefer to exist in a more subjective area where it’s still ok to say a light will have a 100hr+ runtime when reality is that it hits 10% output after 5 hours and slowly goes to 0 over the next 95 hours.
I used to use a pair of Olight S15s that ran on AA NiMH batteries, running them consecutively would be me right around 3 hours of riding before I had to change batteries. Worked great for the past 5 years but next year I’m planning to ride a SR series so I decided to upgrade to a 18650 Rofis TR20 and have been pretty happy so far. The new light runs for 6 hours at the same brightness so I only carry one extra battery and will most likely never have to use it outside of the odd tour or 600k ride.
For rear lights I’ve been running the same 2 PB superflash lights for 7 years. They just seem to work so no point in upgrading? Especially since the biggest visibility/safety upgrade I’ve made is a throwy helmet mounted light. Something about it makes cars give a lot more space than the regular imitation car-style lighting with front/rear white/red bike mounted lights.
I think this is the one Fred is always pushing, looks pretty cool.
Anyone else having trouble with Bike24 images not rendering?
I have two of these silver round units. I don’t use both at once, but they are cheap so I bought another for a second battery and charger when I lost mine. Probably not 1200 lumen, but bright enough for me. I just never felt like building front wheel around a dyno hub so battery lights do the trick.
Some cheap but very bright Chinese light and a random bike brand rear light.
Here’s why I couldn’t stand it: I had to charge them constantly. They drained batteries quickly in the cold. They were fiddle to mount, and I was mounting and denounting them constantly. They had shitty conical beams. I lost their parts pretty frequently. I had to ride home with very dim lights more than I’d like.
Vs a dynamo stop which is always there, always on, never runs out batteries, is mounted once and never touched for years, has a nice beam that lights up more of the road more evenly. I never have to worry about them getting stolen.
I think battery lights are probably ok for certain bikes that rarely ridden at night, or high performance bikes or whatever. But for general purpose or even 95% of all bikes, dynamos are way better objectively.
Edit: also the battery was separate from the light which I really hated too. Mainly I hate the lights I bought but I never want to ride at night with battery lights again.
My friends I bought the third most #lit battery light out there for winter shenanigans.
Moonligt BAD 2000, only to be bested by the BAD 5000 & BAD 10000. Yup that’s 2000 real lumens making all others BLIND.
Pictures taken during pitch black Socialist Nightmare™ night.
25%:
Read for your self:
Daaaaaaaaaang
that’s lit!
i was currious about your dyno setup.
the most prohibitive thing for me is that i have 2 or 3 bikes i’d want to ride at night (not including the commuter) that all get raced-on regularly. plus the cx bikes have tubulars on ‘em about %95 of the time.
I don’t imagine I’ll ever be out for more than 3h, but even then would probably have plenty of time where i’m using the lower settings.
really just looking for a way to mix up the base-phase rides outside of the velodrome.
This was the biggest thing for me. The Cyo isn’t as bright as any of my battery lights, but it puts the light in the right places and I could see way better with it instead of getting blinded by my own light on the pitch black river trail I commuted on.
