Buyer’s Guide to LED Bicycle Lights + Reasons You Should Own One

Cycling can be an amazing recreational activity, but you can be limited if you want to cycle during night hours. Not knowing what’s in front of you and your bike, you can trip over even on the smallest of stones and injure yourself and damage your bicycle. The solution to this issue is simple, LED bicycle lights. You can put any basic type of light on your bike and it will do the job, but you’ll find out soon enough that you’ll need a light with more power to light up the way in front of you.

Here’s a list of things you need to consider when buying LED bicycle lights.

Whether they fit or not on your bike is definitely the first thing you need to check, both the battery (if external) and the light. Depending on the handlebars, some flashlights will fit while others won’t. You have to make sure the flashlight is securely mounted. A great flashlight is of no use if it can’t fit on your bar or if it just moves around too much pointing towards the wrong way.

The amount of power the flashlight produces is an important feature. The amount of lumen your flashlight produces is calculated on LED power and battery charge in ideal conditions with no heat and circuitry issues that reduce it’s efficiency that would sometimes be 30 or 40 per cent higher than the real world measured lumen output of a light.

Battery light is important when you go on long rides, if you take account emergencies or when the battery gets cold or old. Below zero temperatures can also reduce battery life so you should buy a bigger battery if you ride during winter. Some flashlights have indicators for the amount of power left in the battery, so you should look to get one of these, because the emergency battery alert might not be enough.

There’s two places that you can plant your light on – the front and the back. The one on the front should be positioned centrally or offside and should be visible and aligned towards the front. The one on the rear should be a red light, positioned offside or centrally again, and should be visible and aligned towards the back. The rear light is especially important when driving around town to make sure your presence on the road is seen by other participants in traffic.

There’s more to it, but for the sake of simplicity we’ll keep it as it is. These are the most essential features that you need to be looking for in a bicycle light to make sure you have safe rides in the night.