lights for night time event to help me see

nuggiebok

I'm looking for some recommendations for some bike lights that will help me see where I am going on unlit country roads, but the running time must last a night time event - say 5 hours?

Also, I don't have a never ending budget, under £50 would be great. Ideally they would be Li ion and rechargeable although in hindsight I guess standard batteries would be better meaning I can just replace the batteries on the night as and when. This should also keep the price down?

larkim

I have these http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? ... OC:GB:3160

With two you can run one 'til it dies, and then run the other (whilst carrying some AAA replacements if you want backup). Or buy four, wouldn't be too hard to swap out in their mounts whilst rolling along.

Probably not the best solution, but just my thoughts!!

homers_double

I'm currently testing these lights and although I can't give a full reviewjust yet initial rides are positive.

http://dx.com/p/singfire-sf-607-2-x-cre ... aign=homer

ai_1

At that price you're probably going to have to go with a cheap "torch beam" type LED light.
If you could stretch a bit further I'd recommend the Philips Saferide 80 lux but you would need to either run it on low power or modify it for external cells to last 5hrs.
The benefit of this light is that it gives fairly uniform illumination unlike axial beams (torch type) which regardless of the spread (flood or spot) will illuminate the foreground much more than the distance and typically will produce a hot spot in the centre of the beam. This is much less comfortable to use and I would find it very tiring on a long night ride. By comparison the Philips Saferide beam is much more like a car headlight and very comfortable to use.

Ouija

If you want anything bright and that runs for 5 hours you need to ignore anything that doesn't have a Cree XM-L emitter in it and doesn't run off Li-Ion batteries (AAA's only give you a tiny fraction of the voltage and run times of a single Lithium Ion battery).

One of my personal favourites (i own over 20 XM-L based lights) is the Trustfire TR-D002 light. Mainly because it comes with a decent battery pack capable of running the light for three hours on full (much longer on medium). Most of the other double headed lights coming out of the far east at the moment, including the one linked to in an earlier post, come with terrible battery packs (had a couple of Chinese packs lately and they've all been gobsmackingly bad). Where as the two that came with my Trustfires class as some of the best four cell packs i've owned. Also are waterproof and come with a good bag.

Other nice things about that light are the remote switch, so you don't have to take your hand off the bars to dip the lights or turn them on and off, a reasonably good bar mount that doesn't rely on elastic bands to hold it in place and a decent charge indicator (Blue, Green, Amber, Red, Flashing Red) because some lights don't come with battery status indicators or only show the same indicator colour until minutes before the batteries dead, thus not allowing you any real time to replan your route.