we have just come into winter in Australia and the morning rides are done in darkness so I was looking at a new lighting system as my current light is nearly dead.
Was reading a review of various rechargeable lights available in a magazine and the new Cateye Stadium light sounded like the bees knees. Got a friend at my LBS to find out a price for me; $1200 Australian or about USD900.
While the personal safety factor is extremely important to me, that price made me sit down and look at other options.
this is undoubtedly a superb light, which they say puts out 80 watts of lighting compared to 10 watts on most lights. The price just made me go WOW!
80 watts? Cool but impractical. The battery must weigh around 2 kilos just to run it for less than an hour.
You should be able to get a 10/30 watt system for around $200 USD. 10 watts is plenty for most riding and 30 watts is plenty bright when you need it. You should have about 4 hours of light on one charge if you don’t use the high beam too much.
You can also build a rechargeable light system for under $100 USD. I made my own water bottle battery for about $30 after I found out the replacement was over $100 USD. There are several places to get the instructions online.
I have been doing some really long rides of over 24 hours. The last one was 600k or 375 miles. It took over 30 hours with about 4 of those hours off the bike in resturants. Since most rechageable battery lights will not last the night riders use the Cateye IL500H which uses 4 AA’s and puts out good light 2.4 watts, that is focused in a narrow beam which is what you want for road riding. Most of the Night Rider type lights are made for Off-Roaders and puts out a wide beam which is a waste if you are riding on the road.
I have just bought and am building up a Schmitt Dynohub. A lot of the riders who do these long overnight rides go this way since the front hub has a generator built into it. You never have to replace batteries since there are none. You can hook up one or two lights and they put out a great narrow beam pattern for road riding. But no good for off road as you have to be moving for it to work and you have to keep it at least 10KPH to run one light and 15KPH to run both lights.