Originally Posted by
dzrthauler
God I love this forum!! A perfect and timely thread for my wife and I as we are currently doing our research on what type of front and rear lighting we need - primarily for day riding and minimal night riding. I'd love some input... we are in a rural area; traffic "in town" is moderate and has by no means the heavy light pollution as shown in an earlier post with pic. We are also interested in the turn signal concept for our utility & pet trailers... weren't there some bike turn signal applications back in the '70's? I haven't looked to see if any are still in the marketplace currently. Happy Thanksgiving & God Bless!!
For daytime visibility from the rear, with a pet trailer, one off-the-shelf option is a DiNotte 400 taillight in 5-pulse blinking mode.
If you have a rechargeable battery pack in the 9.6-15 volt range, you could also wire up Nova BULL or Whelen TIR3 strobe heads (
edit: or the ones shown above), which sell for about $55-60 each and feature a sync wire so you can set them up for wig-wag or synchronous strobing as desired. Sample of the Nova BULL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3cy6KSr8wk They're also available in amber if you want more of a "caution"-oriented color. These have multiple flash/strobe patterns available, including a 75Hz single-flash mode that would make the amber ones a viable turn signal indicator.
For side visibility, you might consider a MonkeyLectric wheel light, which is an LED light bar that creates the illusion of a pattern as it spins. YouTube has MonkeyLectric videos if you want to see what they look like. They're around $55 at Amazon.com.
For front visibility, any medium-powered or high-powered light could help as a daytime running light.