Wheel lights are a great way to increase your bike’s visibility to oncoming traffic, so they are more or less essential to those who don’t infrequently ride their bikes at night, or in various low-light conditions. They are also, quite frankly, cool-looking. We loaded our bike with a couple of sick-looking wheel lights once, and it was nice to see people gawking from a distance. To be sure, a good pair of front and rear bike lights will suffice to make your bike more visible to traffic. You definitely cannot skip on headlights if you want the road in front of you to be visible in the aforementioned riding conditions—but if you want to up the ante a bit, and have your bike looking much cooler than it is, then you can’t go wrong with a sick pair of wheel lights.
Indeed, the market is saturated with wheel lights these days, with each manufacturer trying to outdo the competition in terms of design. We’ve installed our fair share of wheel lights, too, and, trust us, not all are the same in terms of design and quality. Indeed, some that we’ve tested broke down mere hours after installation. You definitely want to avoid those cheap but low-quality types of bicycle wheel lights—in fact, as long as the price is still within reason, we’d recommend you don’t scrimp on quality unless you don’t intend to use your wheel lights for very long.
In any case, we’d like to help you with your search for a great pair of wheel lights. In this regard, we’ll do a roundup of what we think are the three best bicycle wheel light sets that are available on the market today, so read on!
Best Bicycle Wheel Lights
1. DAWAY LED Bike Spoke Lights
These wheel lights are fantastic because they don’t just feature one type of light pattern design but 30! Not just that, they literally take a few minutes to install, and they’re bright enough to be seen more than a mile away.
The designs change every 4 seconds, and you’re sure to get children (and yes, adults, too) gaping their jaws with wonderment as you pass by. The lights are also waterproof, so going through puddles or getting your tires wet won’t damage them one bit.
The installation is fairly simple and straightforward. It might even be the height of pedantry to go through the steps since we fully trust you’ll know what to do when you see it.
The number of patterns that appear will depend on the rotation speed of your wheels. At around 18 miles per hour and beyond, the full range of patterns will appear, transitioning from one to the next every 4 seconds. At lower speeds, however, the number of patterns that arise will be halved. We’re not sure why they decided on this kind of implementation, and we have to say that we would have wanted the full range of light patterns to appear even at lower speeds, but it is what it is.
Another thing we appreciate about the Daway LED Bike Spoke Lights is that they can be switched to auto mode, which will make them automatically turn off when your bike becomes still for over a minute.
2. Activ Life LED Bike Wheel Lights
The Active Life Bicycle wheelset has 7 colors and 7 combinations to make you an eye magnet at night. It will be especially great to install this in your bike during the Christmas season because there’s just something about the colors and their combination that remind us of the holiday season. Of course, Christmas season or not, they’re a pretty cool set of wheel lights to look at, and for the price, we can definitely recommend them without hesitation.
The 21 individual lights are easy to install, and they are all waterproof, which means you don’t have to worry about getting them wet, or passing through puddles. We’d recommend you get two packs of these lights, however, since one will only be good for a single wheel.
All-in-all, they’re great, and they will definitely get the job done. One reservation we have is that they don’t have nearly as many patterns as the Daway Led Bike Spoke Lights, and they also don’t have an automatic mode by which the lights can switch off automatically. But the price makes this bicycle light set a steal in our opinion.
3. Monkey Light M232
We love all the products from Monkeylectric, in fact, we have them in some of our bikes, and we can’t be happier. Their designs are simply cool and varied, and if your intention is to turn heads wherever you ride, then you can’t go wrong with a set of Monkeylectric lights. Indeed, the wow factor of these wheel lights is the reason why they are among the most popular wheel lights on the market today.
If you’re going for something by Monkeylectric, however, then we’ll have to recommend the Monkey Light M232. They produce 32 different colors, and their intensity can get as high as 200 lumens, which will make your bike visible even at great distances. This bicycle wheel light set is the brightest among all other wheel light sets in this list, and it has, in our opinion, the best patterns and designs. Its designs include hearts, skulls, lightning shapes, etc—oh, you’ll get a lot of attention with these bicycle wheel lights installed on your bike, alright.
We also appreciate the fact that, with the Monkey Light M232, you can lock the pattern you like the most and continuously show instead of having the patterns change regularly. You also can put the lights on power-saving mode, which will effectively make the lights a bit dimmer for those low-light conditions where you won’t need the full power of 200 lumens.
Like the other two bicycle wheelset options we discussed above, the Monkey Light M232 is waterproof—so don’t worry about riding under rain or through a puddle, because they’ll come out fine.
However, take note that one kit only covers a single wheel, and you’ll need to purchase two to cover both.
Bottomline
These are all excellent bicycle wheel light sets to have on your bike. Of course, they’re not all priced the same, because some are definitely better than others. If turning heads is crucial in your buying decision, go for the Monkey Light M232. Trust us—and we know this because we have them on our bike—there won’t be a head that will not turn to look at your wheels when you have the Monkey Light M232 on.
The other two options are great, too, as well as more affordable. You might want to consider them if you want something that will do the job of making your bike visible, as well as turn a few heads your way in the process. But if you really need to know which we prefer between the Daway LED Bike Spoke Lights and the Activ Life LED Bike Wheel Lights, then we have to say we prefer the former, just because it’s got more features, produces more patterns, and it has an automatic mode which we think is kind of sweet.
