My Garmin Edge and Forerunner will pair with my Bontrager lights. I thought it would be a neat, if not handy, feature for the lights to turn on when I started a ride and turn off when I finished, so when I bought the lights I paired them to both devices. Turns out it was neither neat nor handy.

I never figured out what was causing it, but sometimes when I opened my garage door with the remote, the lights would come on. Unpairing the light from the Edge and the Forerunner didn’t help, because for some reason the Forerunner was hell-bent on repairing with the lights. I tried unpairing and restarting the watch, resetting the watch to factory defaults, removing the watch from Garmin Connect, unpairing and then resetting to factory defaults, and every combination in between. I tried Ant and Bluetooth with no difference. It seemed that every time Garmin updated the watch software, the watch would pair itself back to the lights. Fortunately this has stopped occurring because I assume Garmin eventually changed how the update process works or I'm just living right these days and the bike gods think I deserve mercy.

What I eventually found worked best, is taking the bike off the wall, using the buttons to turn on the lights, select the mode and riding the bike. Having the lights come on automagically when I started a ride was a solution to a problem that didn't exist.