budget bike lights

seandonaghy

hi im thinking about buying some bike lights for x-country riding. i have a budget of £100. they dont need to be the best but good enough to be able to see! i have looked at electron 5 and 10 watt lightset and electron 16 LED system. any thoughts on them or any other ideas would be much apreciated. thanks.

The Spiderman

I used the Electron 5 and 10 watt set (EP315) last winter,and for £50 they were pretty good.

Charge times are quite long,the battery is heavy and they are a bit cheap looking,but the light they throw out is quite impressive,

The LED version is more of a comuter light,plus you can upgrade the bulbs in the EH315,so that would be your choice of these 2.

Do a google search for reviews on the very similar Electron EHP310,or look at the reviews on www.chainreactioncycles.com and you will see ,how they can be upgraded via a simple bulb change.

sebthebum

get these they are really good for the money
http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/Models.aspx?ModelID=8915[url]
the battery pack isnt to small but they light up the trails. [/url]

unocogero

Hope have just brought out a new singleLED light for £75

It looks very good and comes in lots of lovely colours...

http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/Mode ... elID=24391

The beam might be a bit narrow but 260 Lumens is pretty damn good. The hopes also have bar or helmet mounting...it looks like a bit of a winner.

Underscore

For XC, I would suggest that you ideally need both helmet and bar lights. One way of getting this inside your budget would be to buy two Fenix L2D Q5 torches - I have one attached to my helmet to compliment the AyUps on my bars. The Fenix chucks out 180lumens on Turbo and runs on 2 AA rechargeables for around a couple of hours - if you need longer just take a spare set of batteries and swap them when the first lot run out.

FWIW, I got mine from www.fenixtorch.co.uk.

_

unocogero

Underscore wrote:

For XC, I would suggest that you ideally need both helmet and bar lights.

Interesting idea about the torches but I don't agree about the handlebar/helmet idea.

I have a set of Hopes on my helemt and they are more than enough. Everywhere you look is lit...it's as simple as that and becuse they are almost at eye level they don't cast shadows.

The problem with handlebar mounted lights is that if you are riding singletrack your handlebars are not always pointing in the direction you want to be going next...and that can be frustrating.