im not talking about being seeing by other cars but seeing the whole road ahead of you at night.any suggestions would be great!

Read thru the Electronics, Lighting and Gadgets forum and the Commuting forum. They're always talking about lights.

Any of the German made dynamo lights... even the cheaper ones are damn bright.

I've found that any light in the 600-800 lumen range to be effective for cruising at 15-20mph on decent paved roads, but I tended to outrun that if I was bombing down a hill above 40mph.

Keith

Go to Fleabay or Amazon and search "cree bicycle headlamp". You'll find dozens of them for $20 and up. I would stick to the single light per unit since you have redundancy if something goes wrong. Get at least 2 of them...one for the bar and one for your head. Three is even better since they are cheap.

One caveat: The lumen rating is way off. They don't put out 1200 lumens. More like 800. That's still very bright for a cheap light. Many "be seen (but not really)" lights cost much more than these.

You'll most likely not see the whole road ahead of you. Compromise and settle for some of that road.

Some shoppers put price as the priority, or should I say value. Some others put reliability and features and then price.

You're asking "which light" but you don't really say which one's. Is it that you want a list?

I use the Lupine Piko 3. Lupine makes great lights. They no longer have the Piko 3 since they have now updated their product line and have the Piko 4 among others. I have had mine since 2011 and have had zero issues with it, and it still works as it did the day I bought it. I do not use it as a helmet light though, I have it mounted to the bike. Yes, expensive, but it was worth it, seven years old and I still use it, with the original battery, and have no need for anything else. https://www.lupinenorthamerica.com/it...?cID=0&PID=548

I have the Light and Motion Urban 800 FC and it's perfect when it's pitch black riding at 30 kph, no need to slow down. The intensity is one thing, the beam pattern is another - this one has both and recharges up quickly (FC).

I've had a car give me the high beams my light was so bright. That's how bright it is.

You must be going faster than the speed of light

I use a Convoy S2+ and a Zebralight SC600 ... this version here

SC600w Mk III HI 18650 Flashlight with Neutral White High Intensity XHP35

Both great lights but require specific batteries / Lion charger

I really like the Bontrager 700 and 800 ion. Very bright, clean, wide beam. Lightweight, with battery inclosed in unit so there are no wires and external battery to mount. 3 steady modes with 2 flash. Good run time, and very quick and easy to swap over to other bikes. Reasonable cost. These are all important features to me. Your needs may vary.

+1. Been using these for years with various mounting rigs. Two random lights. One set wide and low and the other set narrow and high. 18650 batteries, chargers are cheap and you can carry and swap out as many as you need and if your cheap light fails you already have other batteries and chargers for your replacement. I've been using the same 2 cheap lights for 2 years so far and they also become lights I use around the house too.

My wife and I use Cygolite Metro 850's. It puts out a great amount of light that fills your immediate vision. In my experience, this light can be too bright for oncoming motorists, so you have to aim it properly. Also, the Cygolite has adjustable modes so if you run it on low or medium, you can extend your ride time. We usually start riding before dark, but we've gone over an hour on the high setting without running it down

I see pretty much every available light available on local group night rides. From the Cygolites to Light & Motion to NiteRider, Serfas, Bontrager, Blackburn to the many variations of the same three lights sold under dozens of names on Amazon and ebay. They're all pretty similar.

But not identical. My Light and Motion Urban 500 on medium and Serfas SL-255 on high have pretty much the same output, but very different beam shapes. The L&M is more evenly distributed, the Serfas SL-255 is nearly a spotlight. Most popular lights I've seen among dozens of local fellow cyclists fall somewhere between those extremes.

Get something with at least 500 lumens and you'll be fine for most nighttime rides. But if you spend a little more for something in the 800-1200 lumen range, you can run 'em on medium or low power, still get adequate light, and it'll run for hours. A typical 500 lumen light run at high power will last only 60-90 minutes, maybe a little longer when new but gradually decreasing in run time as the battery is recharged. If you get a 1000-1200 lumen light and run it on medium you'll get around 500 lumens for up to 3 hours or longer.

Just depends on how long your typical nighttime ride lasts. Turns out I ride a lot more at night than I'd expected, especially in hot summer when I start later, so my next light will have more power so I can run it longer on medium or low.

While I agree that generic lights lie about the output, I don't agree with the rest. The $20 lights from Fleabay are rugged and reliable. There is little to go wrong with them. And even if something does go wrong with them, they are cheap to replace. Additionally, because they are so cheap, running multiple lamps is cheaply possible. You can get 3 lights for less than most "be seen" lights which means that you can throw out a lot more light for a lot less money. They may output 800 lumens instead of 1200 lumens but when you have 3 of them, that's a total output of 2400 lumens which is an astounding amount of light.

As for the optics, the differences are overblown. The common argument is that the Magicshine clones throw light into the top of trees but this is obviously wrong if you've ever used one (or three). I can see where my light is shining and I'm not lighting up the tops of trees unless I tip my head up and intentionally light up the top of a tree.

I have a Cygolite Expillion 850. It's currently $80 but I paid around $130 for it...actually bought it with REI dividends...several years ago. I'm not terribly impressed. The optics for the light are exactly like the optics for my cheap Fleabay lights. The output is slightly less than the Fleabay light but, most importantly, the run time is severely limited. On high...why would you run anything else...the Cygolite lasts about 30 minutes. It's okay for the shoulder season when I only need a few minutes of light in the mornings but for the depth of winter, it's severely lacking. The lights I currently have will provide me with enough power for about 2 hours of commuting.

Finally, if the goal is to have lights at night, you can save up your money and spend $80 to $300 on a light with about the output of a $20 Fleabay light while either not riding at night or riding with substandard lights until you've got the money saved or you can spend 1/5 of that amount and be riding now with a lot more light.

I think you'll find the Cycgolite uses the exact same Li-ion batteries from China that are know to catch fire that you refer to ..... along with your mobile phone and laptop.


It has the disadvantage that it's USB chargeable so when it's half empty you have to re-charge it before you go out and if you forget and it runs out half way through your ride instead of just changing the battery for a spare you'll be walking home or calling for someone to come and pick you up.

There are a number of good quality 185650's available - Samsung, LG, Efest, Sanyo, Fenix, Nitecore, O-Light - to name but a few and good quality chargers, all of these batteries including the ones in the Cygolite can only be recharged a certain amount of times before they need replacing ... with the Cygolite you have to buy a whole new unit ... with the others just another £5 battery.

There are also quality torches like the Convoy I mentioned at a budget and have an extremely good reputation among torch addicts / enthusiasts or the more expensive Zebralight I mentioned which have a reputation as some of the best torches you can buy but obviously they are more expensive.

Bike torch manufacturers are trying to steer you in the direction of USB rechargeable lights with integrated batteries ... why .... because every couple of years you have to buy a whole new unit to increase their sales / profitability rather simply buying another battery.

Just found this video which shows the battery in the Cygolite is just an 18650 with the addition of a plug to make it harder for the average user to just swap out.

Yes, I'm talking about external battery packs. But, as I pointed out above, integral units don't have the run time of external batteries. The integral units certainly have a convenience factor but that's not the only consideration that I look at for lights.

As for the batteries being "known to catch fire", provide an instance of a "known fire" caused by bicycle lights.

I have a 2 halogen bulb light up the woods night rider its 12v, it had a NiCad 11 1.2v cell water bottle battery .

one can also use a 12v gel cell motor bike battery.. they're offered quite small..

will sell...

All the cheap cree lights I've had either had too narrow of a beam for cycling, a noticeable "ring" somewhere in the beams light range, or they crapped out in short order. Because of this I'll only go with lights made by well known and trusted companies that specialize in bicycle specific gear.

And that ring does what to your ride? Mine has a ring too, it causes zero impact on my night bike ride. Two hours I swap in a new battery and it still has a ring and I'm still riding.

Not true. Search the internet and you can find people who have torn down li-ion batteries and seen some horribly unsafe batteries. Buy reputable brand name batteries from reputable sellers. Vendors will advertise 5800 mAh 18650 batteries, which is impossible. Why would you trust them? Home | BudgetLightForum.com is very active with recommended brands and vendors. You also need to buy a decent charger. Flashlight information has very thorough reviews of batteries and chargers. I charge my 18650 batteries on the kitchen counter while I am sitting on the couch where I can see and hear if anything happens. Ditto charging my mac. 18650 batteries have a lot of power and if something bad happens, fires or explosions and flying bits can result.

Don't you remember all the stories on the news about batteries starting fires on lots of hoverboards**********

A little bit of precaution goes a long way. Here are a couple more web sites: Safety Concerns with Li-ion Batteries ? Battery University https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Resear...use-assessment

Samsung is a reputable company and their phone caught fire. I suspect that Boeing used reputable companies to source their batteries. In both cases (and the one above), the end user made mistakes. Boeing and Samsung didn't program their charge/recharge protocols correctly and the guy in the scenario above allowed his battery to be charge where the heat could build up. All Li-ion batteries have a chance of risk if they are not cared for properly and most people have no idea if they are doing it right or not.

My Dinotte was very expensive, but I was looking for reliability and a smooth beam pattern with no hotspots or rings. I needed at least 2 hours of runtime, longer than most of those self contained USB lights. This XML-3 model runs 10 hours at 500 lumens, 5 hours at 1000, and 2.5 hours at 2000 lumens.

For dark country roads, more than 800-1000 lumens makes the reflective signs way too bright for my night vision.

I like my Dinotte's 2000 (actual) lumens in the city. Riding through bright street lit areas, with much darker areas in between, and lots of car headlights, I like the bright light to compete with these wildly varying lighting conditions. And I get a large, bright pool of light on the road, which helps make me more visible to drivers.

I think now I'd get a pair of cheap no-name lights, perhaps one self contained light and one external battery. So I'd still have a light if one quit during the ride. But the beam patterns are likely to be less smooth. Hotspots are distracting to me, but I suppose a rider gets used to them, making them less annoying.