At the recent Mont 24hr, Flow parked up next to the guys from Nitelights. Their tent saw a near constant stream of riders coming in, handing over their cash and walking out with a new set of lights.
Why? Well, everyone gets a little worried at a 24hr that their old lights aren’t going to be up to the job, but more importantly, the price is right. Their 1100 lumen light is $170, the new 2000 lumen is $280, and both were even cheaper at the event itself. That’s chicken feed.
We had to investigate and so secured both the 1100 and 2000 lumen light for testing. We rode them both during the Mont event itself and have used them on numerous subsequent night rides.
We’ve never completely drained either battery, so we can’t comment with 100% certainty on claimed charge and burn times, but suffice to say we ran both lights on full power for over two hours without any sign of the batteries running low.
We took to running the 2000 lumen light on our helmet and the 1100 on our bars. The simple o-ring bar mount is easy to use and works perfectly. The double sided Velcro used to secure the helmet mount is a bit more fiddly, tending to get stuck to helmet pads, but it has the advantage of working with any helmet on the market.
The lights come with a long cable to allow you to run the battery in your pack/pocket. This is great if you’re helmet mounting them, but if you’re running them on the bars you’re left with a very long cable to deal with which we ended up wrapping around our stem. We’d like to see the option of shorter cables for bar mounting.
On trail lighting performance was very good for the price. Both lights have a high and low power mode, plus a flashing mode, which brings us to our only real gripe; you need to cycle through the flashing mode every time you toggle between high and low power modes. Annoying disco trail…
We wouldn’t run the 1100 lumen as our stand alone light, though you could easily get away with just running the 2000 lumen on your head and nothing else. With both in place, there was illumination aplenty; we’re big advocates of the ‘more light is better’ school of thought.
For the money, these are a great, bright option for night riding. There are plenty of more refined systems out there, but not at this price.