I like products made for cyclists by cyclists, and when they’re Australian cyclists, it’s much more likely to address my situation, since I’m also an Australian cyclist. Made in Adelaide, the Nite Flux Red Zone 8 Rear Light is possibly the most powerful rear light on the market, pumping out 400 Lumens of red light over a 300 degree spread; more than enough to be seen very clearly, even in the daylight.
The Nite Flux looks significantly different to most rear lights on the market. It’s a carbon fiber tube with a large battery inside (it looks like an 18650 or similar) which is mounted to a circuit board. The circuit board has a usb recharge port on one end and a red button on the other. The tube also has some cutouts on each end and the exposed circuit board at these points has two little red dots mounted to it. I mention this specifically because I was looking for the LEDs and the lenses (it is a light, after all) and couldn’t find them, so I hit the red button and HOLY CRAP I’M BLIND. Those little red dots are the LEDs! Seriously, if you could make this product go “bang”, you could sell it to the military as a stun grenade. There’s a lot of light coming from those tiny little dots.
While having exposed LEDs like this all over your bike would make you visible from the moon, having a car hit you because the motorist was blinded by your lights is probably something you would want to avoid. Fortunately, the Nite Flux has silicon end caps which weatherproof the device and provide useful light diffusion. Even diffused, the light is wonderfully bright and overpowers everything else I have in my rear light arsenal.
The Nite Flux takes about 6 hours to recharge fully via a USB cable and gives you around 100 hours of flashing red light on its lowest setting. If you run it on solid, it will give you 120 lumens for 3 hours, and if you ran it on its highest flash setting at 400 lumens, it will give you a four hour run time. I hate having to mess around with my cycling gadgets every day, so I tend to choose products that will give me a commuting week’s worth of run time (for me around 8 hours) and then charge the gadgets all at once. I ran the Nite Flux on a combination of flashing modes and it never ran out between recharges, so it’s a good set and forget product for me. If you are the type who doesn’t want to set and forget, you can follow the instructions provided with the light and change the flashing patterns and strength, so you can customise the light to suit your riding needs.
The benefits of this light are pretty obvious: it’s very bright, bright enough to see in the daytime and from kilometres away during the night. I’ll add to this that it’s a very simple and straight forward product to use. These two pros are enough to sell it and it’s definitely a product I would buy. There is a major downside that’s worth mentioning, which may factor into your thinking, and that’s the Nite Flux’s size; it’s quite large and will take up a lot of your seat post space, if that’s where you want to mount it. I can’t run this and the Fly 6 on the same post. Mounting it on the seat stays (on the right hand side, where I’ve mounted secondary rear lights before) wasn’t an easy option with the mounts provided, but the straight foward design of the Nite Flux lends itself to other options and the manufacturers produce a range of alternate mounts. I don’t use a saddlebag, so mounting this horizontally under the saddle would probably be the best option for me. It’s also easy to transfer between bikes, so one light and a few mounts is all you need for your stable.
It’s a different looking light, but it works very well. The Nite Flux range includes a lower powered rear light (Red Zone 4), as well as two white lights (to be seen by, not to see with), the White Zone 5 and 10, all of which have the same form factor. They’re all worth having a look at and may be just the safety lights to fit your bikes and riding style. The 400 Lumen Night Flux Red Zone 8 reviewed here is priced at $150 which includes shipping. You can get these lights online from Full Beam Australia.
