Postby iviehoff » 14 Sep 2011, 12:40pm
Whatever you go for, have a little thought about reliability and its consequences. Many bicycle lights, whether dynamo or battery have unreliabilities. Dyno lights can fail ot work because of a hard-to-find bad contact, or a blown component, or a vandal breaking it (yes it happened to me). Battery lights can fail to work because the battery is flat (accidentally switched on in bag), some hard-to-find internal bad contact, or because they fall off the bracket and the lorry behind you crushes it (yet it happened to me). Bicycle lights of all kinds tend to be rather unreliable, whether due to inherent error or operator error.
I cycle on a very dark, narrow lane with no footway for about half a mile twice a day, and not having working lights strikes me as a very unpleasant situation to be in. I wouldn't walk along that road full stop, and certainly not at night without a light. That is why I insist on having two independent lighting systems, one with batteries and one without batteries. I have chosen to use Reelights as the battery-less component, as they are (nearly) no friction and rather cheaper than other low friction system such as dynohubs. Since they aren't bright enough to see by, and are a bit more unreliable than some other systems, that means that they are the back-up, the main lights are the battery lights: I have a fairly expensive superbright battery LED front light, I only need to change th ebatteries every few months. If I was happier to leave a more valuable bicycle at the station, I could have gone for dynohubs as main light, plus some very cheap battery LEDs as the back-up.