Knog Boomer 1 LED Wearable Rear Light

The Knog Boomer Wearable is very similar at first glance to its big brother, the Boomer Rechargable, being a brash, bright LED illuminated rear light. But this is where the similarity ends, since for one thing, the Boomer Wearable is battery powered (using 2 AAAs), and if you're wondering about that name, it IS also wearable.

With a sturdy plastic clip to the rear being part of the molded design, the Boomer Wearable hides a sneaky little secret, there's a tear shaped extra piece to the clip, which stays put with strong magnets until you need to release it. The idea is that this functions as a normal clip on light, but if you don't have anything to clip it on to, you can magnetically attach it to something like clothing or a bag instead, using this little panel. The light has three flashing modes and one continuous, and its single super bright LED is genuinely bright enough (30 lumens) for urban riding or dark country lanes.

It's a handy little light, throwing out a terrific lot of illumination and is very obvious. The clip means it fastens easily to any light tab on jackets, bags, wedge packs and the like, which are getting to be more and more common in riding specific kit. It stays put very well, unphased by bumpy terrain, but the magnetic panel can occasionally be knocked loose when clipping the light onto stuff, so it's worth keeping a bit of an eye on that. One of the road.cc team did lose his commuting in to the office and didn't notice until he'd got there - he reckoned it went when he knocked his backpack against a wall when he stopped to do a bit of shopping - he was just using the clip though and not the magnet. UPDATE: Did I say one of the road.cc team? Make that two almost as soon as the review went up another member of the team reported that he'd lost his at some point mid-ride too.

For those times when you don't have a lighting tab to hand, the magnetic attraction of the panel is very useful. It's a strong magnet, even keeping the light secure through a fairly thick softshell jacket, but I was still sufficiently paranoid that it seemed a good idea to place the magnet inside the rear pocket of my jacket. You can find a flashing light easily enough if it pops off (provided you notice) but not a small unilluminated magnet. However, it did not pop off anyway, although it wouldn't be too hard to dislodge if you caught it against something.

Build quality is pretty good and it's water resistant. The only snag with the soft touch silicon body is that it's quite tricky to get the light apart to change the battery. Fortunately, you don't have to do that too often.

Comes in six colours.

Verdict

Handy versatile rear safety light, good for when you want it mounted anywhere but the clip design needs some work. Originally (well, earlier today) we gave the Wearable Boomer a 7, but we feel that it has to go down a point given that two out of three of ours got lost even though I managed to hang on to the test one.