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This year to maximise my riding time I would like to start night riding on my road bike and to do some trail riding in the dark, mostly Cannock Chase!
Does anyone ride road bikes in the dark other than for commuting? I have a cheap cateye set for commuting but think sorting more substantial will be required to purposely ride at night as I hope to ride unlit country roads!
For the rear I was thinking an exposure flare so I can swap between bikes dependant on off or on road, thoughts?
For the front I really wasn't sure, will a Hope 1 be enough to see on unlit country roads? I will then team this with a decent helmet light for trail riding? Or do I go for a hope vision 2 or 4?
Will the 4 be a bit bulky for road riding?
Any experiences/advice or thoughts welcome, even if it's to say what a stupid idea night time road riding is!
No amount of lights would be too much, and as long as they are bright enough then no reason not to change between road and offroad! It's the same light they put out after all! Get a helmet light on for road riding too, just try not to point it directly at cars if it's a bright one.
Does anyone else have any experience of road night riding?
I've done a fair bit over the past year.
I disagree with the "you can't have too much light" approach. It's kinda true, but road isn't like off-road because it matters where that light goes. The problem with off-road lights (in fact most so-called "road" lights too) is that they have symmetric beams, ie they just piss out light in a cone shape. That means one of two things: either you illuminate your front wheel or you dazzle oncoming drivers.
Some people are happy to do that. Personally, even using just a Joystick, I found lots of drivers would simply fire up main beam and dazzle me in return. One even beamed up and stopped quite a long way off, waiting for me to come past, leaving me to wonder whether I was going to get some sort of putting-straight when I got to the car - not realy what you want in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere.
The other point about having an off-road piss-it-everywhere beam is that half of your light simply isn't going on the road, and not even all that's on the road is on useful parts of the road.
So I can heartily recommend lights that conform to the German StVZO standards. They put the light where you want it (including concentrating it more towards the distance to counteract the falloff), and they don't put it anywhere else. That means for a given amount of juice you get better illumination and/or more burn time.
All good so far. The only thing is that German legislation also demands very widespread use of dynamos ([url= http://sweetbike.org/2012/06/08/of-dynamos-and-bike-lights ]this easy-reading article's worth a shufty[/url]) so most of the lights you'll find are dyno lights.
There are a few battery ones though, notably the Philips Saferide (mentioned in the baove article). I've seen videos of people using it off-road and it chucks out plenty of light. It's an asymmetric road beam, but you just angle it up a bit compared to the road position. To extend the runtime you could carry spare batteries and/or plug in an external USB battery.
Personally, I played with battery lights for a bit but then made the leap to dyno - a Shimano XT hub and a B&M Cyo lamp. The hub, lamp, rim and spokes set me back £150 from Bike24, £50-100 less than a competing symmetric-beam battery lamp such as the Strada. If you're looking at frequent flipping between a 26" and a 700c bike then it's probably not the way forward. But if you start enjoying night riding then a dyno is a godsend: you never have to charge anything, you're never limited by burn time, never caught short when a ride takes longer than expected.
There are only two downsides with the cut off German beam: firstly it's not great at illuminating signs, and secondly if you're spending *really* long hours in the dark you do start to go a bit mad with the tunnel vision.
So - if you don't mind being main-beamed then your choice is pretty wide, you just have the challenge of getting enough burn time with a bright-enough light (remember, you can at least halve lumens for road riding if you're comparing lights, it's lux at middle-distance that counts; for comparison, judging by a recent ride my Cyo is comfortably on a par with a Toro on medium in terms of illuminating the road, even though it's just a single LED). I guess it's a case of deciding whether your priority is the road or off-road.
You can always do what I did - pick up a cheap off-road light as a deliberately temporary measure and suss out whether you actually like night road riding (there's a lot to like but plenty to dislike as well) before sinking more funds into it.
I just use my old Lumicycle HID and a couple of ordinary LED things. I just have the HID pointing towards the ground more than I do off-road. Seems to work ok, dont think i've annoyed too many drivers.
use my troutlights LL for road and off road, gerneally run it on lower settings and pointed further down on the road. I also run the mount loose enough to dip and raise by hand depending on the sort of road/ speed/ traffic around
I do both and have a magicshine MJ872. Its dead cheap and dead bright. Good off road but it could do with a bit more throw on the road.
The AYUP lights are really good for both. The heads move easily so you point them away from traffic. They come with extra batteries, so you can always have one fully charged. You can use one on the bars and one on your head when MTB'ing. Then one on the bars and use the other as a rear when on the road...they come with red lenses you can pop in for that.
Typical STW though, I haven't got a set! A mate swears by them though. 😀
I would second ay-ups - easily adjustable beam, red caps for rear use. Very versatile.