Hands-on: Trevor Baylis' wind-up Bike Lights

The clocks have gone back, it's virtually dusk by 1pm and it's cold, which can mean only one thing... flat bicycle light batteries. Who you gonna call? Try Trevor Baylis and his latest wheeze, wind-up Micro Bike Lights (pictured).

We were furnished with a pair by ECOutlet and have been giving them a whirl on our eight-mile daily London commute. At £20 for a back and front pack, the lights came in at a reasonable enough price for us to consider as a back-up to our normal trusted Cat Eye lights.

The concept, as you'll have gathered if you've ever had a wind-up radio, torch or similar, is dead simple. Unfold the light's crank from underneath, and then wind it up for all you're worth, optionally singing The Prodigy simultaneously. These bike lights claim to give 90 minutes' light for one minute's winding -- but that's 90 minutes of the power-saving one LED mode, which is just too dim for the road. For the full-power three LED mode, you're realistically looking at half-an-hour for a minute's winding.

The good thing here is that the crank is easy to wind and the resulting light is bright enough to put you on motorists' radars -- although not as bright as my £10 Cat Eye light. The advantage over my bog standard Cat Eye is that this light will always be ready to ride after a few minutes' winding, regardless of whether the batteries have run down in my jacket pocket or I just forgot to charge them. They're also fairly small and portable compared to most lights, though not as compact as these tiny ones.

And the bad stuff? Well, the mounts for the lights are pretty terrible, and we speak from experience of over a dozen different ones. Instead of tightening with a simple screw and screwdriver, you have to wind them tight, which just doesn't work well -- to our shame, we accidentally snapped one of the mounts, and we were being delicate with it. Installation's just a one-off job, though, so you might not find this an issue. Our other gripes are the design -- not ugly-stick ugly, just a touch drab -- and the way the lights are slightly fiddly to slide on and off their mounts.

As an aside, you may notice on the lights' packaging that it says they're "not suitable for public highways". Worry not, according to British law, neither are any bicycle lights that have the capability to flash intermittently -- in other words, every set of bike lights I've ever owned and the vast majority in your local bike shop.

All told, we like these lights so far. The winding's not too much of a hassle, the light level ain't bad and they're cheap -- you won't exactly be salivating with excitement at them, but you will be grateful for finding them in your bag at the end of a late dark night.

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