MonkeyLectric bike lights review

It wasn’t too long after I bought my bike that I did my first Critical Mass. If you’re not familiar, Critical Mass is cycling event that happens on the last Friday of every month. It’s just a bunch of cyclist who get together to ride through the city and yell “Happy Friday!” at everyone. It’s probably the most fun thing in the whole wide world. Anyway, I went to my first one thinking “dude, I’m totally going to have the coolest looking bike”. I love my bike, I think it’s absolutely gorgeous (which I’m sure you already know if you follow me on instagram since I’m always posting photos it.) But after Critical Mass I realized my bike was missing something – lights!

It didn’t take long at all before I found the lights. MonkeyLectric makes a few different kinds of lights that absolutely blew me away. There was no way they could be as cool in person as they looked online (spoiler alert: they are!) I got the M210, which about 2.25 inches tall and has 20 different themes, for my rear wheel and the M232 for my front wheel which has 48 themes and is 6.5 inches tall. Essentially what that means is that my entire front wheel and around the rim on the rear are illuminated.

 They’re super easy to install and run on 3 AA batteries. They’re waterproof, affordable, and best of all, they’re SUPER BRIGHT. I do most of my riding at night so I get a lot of use out of them. They look amazing but they also increase my visibility which obviously is very important. On my first ride with the lights, within minutes of turning them on, I had a car pull up and ask where they were from. They are showstoppers. People are always pointing, staring, and shouting how they love my bike. Getting attention from kids, who are almost always in awe, is probably my favorite thing about them!

One con is I can’t really control the lights. The packaging had extremely basic instructions on how to choose the pattern you’d like it to display. Jeff, and I are both very competent when it comes to electronics but for the life of us both we couldn’t set it to display the patterns we wanted. I’m not sure if it’s a glitch in the set I got, if we’re both completely missing something that’s actually really easy or it’s actually a design fault. Basically the issue is that I can’t seem to choose a specific one I want it to show, it always seems to display the one I want and then cycle to the next shortly after. Somehow I set it to display stars for a few weeks but how that happened is beyond me.

It’s a very small flaw (that, like I said, could definitely be something that is our fault! Hard to tell when the directions are so limited though!) that is completely worth overlooking. These lights are incredible. I feel so much safer with them on my bike even though I definitely got them for vanity reasons.

They surprisingly have a really great battery life too. I’ve had my set for a few months, I ride a couple times a week for a few hours at a time, and just last week I had to finally change the batteries for the first time. I’d say that’s pretty impressive.

All in all, these lights are AMAZING. If you own a bike, I don’t know why you don’t already have these light on there!
xoxo