Placing front light when you also have a handlebar bag

[flocsy]

This might be a possible solution: https://www.ortlieb.com/uk_en/handlebar-mounting-set-support I suspect it'll be a bit wobbly with a heavy lamp and it's not clear if it is removable after the mount has been fixed on the handlebar without undoing the strip that fixes the mount to the bar.

[Andre Jute]

Paul and George: I'm sure B&M will explain to you, if you complain to the factory about the current IQ switch's wilful ways, how it is an "improvement" over the merely logical and reliable OFF--PERMANENTLY ON--AUTOMATICALLY ON ONLY IN LOW LIGHT of the first series IQ Cyo. The improvement, though they won't admit to it, is that they don't trust their consumers to put their brains in gear; they think they know better what functions you should be in control of, and it is an "improvement" for them to grab control from your hands.

I love Germans -- they're always on time for meetings and their obsessive-compulsive streak makes for good engineering, but they lose me when they assume axiomatically that I am an idiot who will blindly follow the normative* case as stated from Bonn in a tone of smarmy superiority.

* "normative" a word in economics which doesn't mean normal i.e what is, quite the contrary: it means "what should be in the view of a self-appointed moral elite"

[flocsy]

BTW if there's a light sensor in it to turn on/off automatically then what happens when during the night you pass below a street light?

[Andre Jute]

BTW if there's a light sensor in it to turn on/off automatically then what happens when during the night you pass below a street light?

Nothing happens. The sensor has a threshold. I must confess that I've always run my lamps permanently on, day and night, so while all my lamps are the sensor type, I have little experience running them in sensor mode. But when the sensor lamps were new and I was interested I noted that dawn and dusk was a large enough change to trigger the sensor, and so was riding from sunshine into a tunnel, and also riding out of it again into sunshine. Impressive but not the whole story.

Unfortunately other dangerous situations for cyclists don't trigger the lamps. I remember one vividly. In my town in West Cork, there's a church, a big solid building right on the street, no garden around it. Behind it is a T-junction. These are the busiest streets in the town because they are also the main road to about a third of the country. Riding across the top of the T one afternoon, shepherding some uncertain new cyclists, I noticed that as they rode into the shadow cast by the church, they disappeared because my photosensitive shades took their cue from the downshaft of the T which was brilliantly lit over the church by the sun, and so did my lamps' sensors: the lamps didn't go on. Motorists behind me would have to depend on their car's daylight lamps picking up the motorcyclist's Sam Hardy reflective belt wrapped around the offside pannier basket on my bike for exactly situations like that, which are plentiful here and no doubt everywhere else. Normally I would in any event use flashing lamps, a red one at the back, a white one at the front, to supplement the wretched absence of a blinking mode on the BUMM lamps, but the bike was new and I hadn't fitted them yet. I fitted them the moment I got home, and set the BUMM lamps to permanently ON, and they've been on for the next 13 years, day and night, whenever the bike rolls. There's no downside in letting the lamps shine 24/7 if you cycle that much: those LEDs are good for 50,000 hours, so another quantum shift lamp will come along long, long before you use them up.

[John Saxby]

I use a different setup, which has no problem with either a handlebar bag or with an Arkel small "bar" bag attached to a Thorn accessory bar set below the handlebars:

   > my light is a Cygolite which I've used for about 10-plus years.  It has a built-in lith-ion battery. Weight?  Um, "quite light" - 4oz, maybe?  It has several modes -- I use the daytime flash mode almost exclusively. (I rarely ride at night -- too many hazards, and my eyes aren't good enough.) My light has about 420 lumens capacity, if memory serves.  There are current models which offer about 600, up to well over 1000.

   > the Cygolite has a nice swivel feature, approx 30º.  It can be removed easily from its holder, so could be used as a flashlight.  The holder clamps onto the bar, fixed in place by a sturdy plastic twistgrip allowing a finger-tight pressure.  That in turn allows e to raise or lower the beam/flash as needed.

   > to recharge this and other electronics:  I have a SON28 dynahub hooked up to a Sinewave Revolution charger. The SON28 charges an Anker 5200Ah cache battery -- usually from 0 to full in 3-4 hours' riding, depending on the terrain. I charge my various electronic items overnight.

   > I usually need to recharge: my headlight (roughly every 3-4 days on average); my phone (depends on type of use - typically every other night); two tail lights, one as backup (seatbag light has two rechargeable AAAs, recharged every few days); headlamp (3 AAAs every 2-3 days); and my Panasonic Lumix camera (maybe every 2-3 days, depending on use.

   > I carry an adapter with a USB cord so that I can use mains power if need be.

I've used this arrangement for the past 6 years with no problems.  Initially, I ran a headlight on my Raven, but that had priority for my SON's output, and I was unable to charge my cache battery while using the light. Also, the light I had mounted (an AXA item) had a crappy support bracket, which eventually fractured. Rather than replace it, I switched to the setup described above.

I've found this arrangement simple and reliable. Recharging just becomes part of my daily touring routine.  When I'm at home, I get lazy, and just use the mains for anything that needs to be recharged.