NiteRider Minewt Review

Tonight I hit the Wed night Thrilla ride with some racing acquaintances. The ride started without two of my friends who were stuck in traffic. Luckily for them I flatted a mere 3 miles into the ride. I decided to let everyone go on ahead and after some careful tire inspection finally found the culprit: a little piece of blackberry thorn. Yep, it drilled its way through my tire just enough to wreak havoc and likely caused last week's flat. My two friends caught up and off we went, only to be derailed by a broken chain halfway through the ride. Not me this time! Despite the mechanicals, we still logged 15 miles and over 1k of climbing. We had a great time and the Minewt turned out to be the highlight of the night. Cute eh?

The NiteRider Minewt USB Mini Pro Review....

I've had a CygoLite DualCross 200 headlight that I've happily road commuted with for quite some time, but decided that for night time trail riding I should get a helmet light to complement. I went light shopping at Gregg's today and chose the Minewt USB Pro for a few reasons. Compared to other lights at a comparable $100 price range, this one is USB-chargeable, has a longer run time (3 hrs), lighter battery, and faster charge time (3-4 hrs). The Pro version comes with a helmet mount that costs about $30 extra. It's well worth it though once you figure out how to install it.

I assumed the light would come with some directions, but no, nothing. Ok, installing the mount should be pretty easy. Well, it took some time for sure and it wasn't quite as straight-forward as I would have hoped. After about 30 minutes of fiddling and looking at a few images on Google I got it. Once you get it, it makes sense and it's a surprisingly stable little mount.

I've never ridden with a helmet light and expected to notice extra weight, which I did at first, but after a few minutes I forgot about it. The whole system is amazingly light weight. The mount doesn't rattle or move around and stays very stable so I never noticed I was wearing it.

When it finally got dark enough to use the light I was pretty damn surprised when I switched it on. Wow it's bright! A few minutes later I turned on my CygoLite and started checking the cables because it wasn't coming on. I pulled off the trail to double-check. No wait, it IS on, it's just being grossly out-shined by the Minewt. The CygoLite didn't even become useful until it was completely pitch black, and even then it just offered a wide angle ambience compared to the Minewt, which was much more directed.

The big bonus of a helmet light in general is that you can point your head at exactly what you want to light up. Duh, right? Well, you don't notice how useful this is until you switch it off and take corners with just a handlebar-mounted light. That lasted about 5 seconds before I almost ended up in the blackberries.

Overall, this little light is quite the bang for the buck. It's got a bright, highly directed beam of light. The sturdy helmet mount and light weight battery pack make it completely stealth. The on/off button on the battery pack is easy to find and use while using thick mountain bike gloves. USB chargeable rocks.

I could really only find two slight cons, and even at that they're not a big deal for me. Lack of directions for installing the helmet mount was a bit frustrating. Some type of illustration or directions would be nice. The light also doesn't have any multimodes (high-beam, low-beam, flash) but I don't personally need that on the trail so it's not an issue for me.

You could probably use the Minewt as a solo light source but I think it's best used as a helmet light paired with another lighting system. The Minewt definitely outshined my CygoLite in intensity, but the CygoLite offers a broader range of light and a very long 4-9 hour run time depending on the mode. These two in tandem worked really well. The darker picture at left is illuminated with just my CygoLite. The picture at right is the Minewt.

I ran the Minewt for about an hour tonight and would like to test it to the 3-hr run time at some point. I'm sure I'll have plenty of opportunities, especially if I do Spokane or Moab.