The Best Off Road Cycle Lights

When you cycle off road, it is less likely that you will encounter a paved path. Lights for off-road cycling are important to help navigate your way through environmental obstacles like tree roots, shrubs, animals, overgrown plants, water systems and other terrain factors. Cycle lights can help you navigate through fog and rain as well as at night time. The best lights in this market are light emitting diodes, metal halide lamps and halogen lights.

  1. Light Emitting Diode (LED)

    • LEDs are a good choice for off-road cycling due to their high energy efficiency. As technology expands, higher light beam output white LEDs are now on the market and becoming more affordable. Because the technology for LEDs is still progressing, the lights are still pricier than other cycle lights on the market. However, LEDs offer a range of benefits that have made them popular. Unlike metal halide lamp lights, they switch instantly on and off, are free from flickering and have a high color temperature for visibility. They are power efficient, relatively affordable and offer a long bulb life. They run on any available power and will dim as a warning when battery reserve becomes low.

    Metal Halide Lamps

    • Halide lamps represent bulb technology at work, with light so bright that they are used in stadium floodlights. As an additional positive factor, the lamps produce a hard white light with a high color temperature effective for navigating off-road. Metal halide lamps have a longer life span than typical halogen lamps. These cycle bulbs produce light by means of an electrical arc between two electrodes. Metal halide lights are also called High Intensity Discharge (HID) since high pressure inside the light creates discharge vapors. The high quality of these bulbs translates to higher cost. In addition, these lights cannot be easily switched on or off because the circuitry used to initially create the arc takes time to reset. Therefore, the light's life span is affected by the number of times it is turned off and on.

    Halogen Lamps

    • Halogen lights are the cheapest and most established off-road cycling light source on the market, and therefore one of the best known of the three lights listed. Light in halogen lamps is produced when an electric current passes through a filament. Some halogen lamp manufacturers have increased performance in the bulbs by over-volting, where a bulb is attached to a battery producing greater volts than the bulb can handle. However, this shortens the bulb's life span. Halogen lights are cheap, readily available and easily accessible, but have poor efficiency compared to LEDs and metal halide lamps.