If you’re looking for quality LED Lighting solutions for your offroad situation, then let the guys at LightNites (http://www.lightnites.com) help you out. Having said that, the LED lighting solutions provided by LightNites can be used pretty much anywhere from your home, your shed, your boat, your camper/caravan, your car… Anywhere that has a need for light, and access to 12v power. As a small company they are dedicated to providing not only a great quality product, but great customer service, which counts for an awful lot these days.

LightNites was founded on 2008 by Mark Murray from Broome 4WD and was the first sell remote control LED lighting for 4WD’s, caravans cars and boats.  When LEDs were still a new technology and just becoming affordable for the consumer, LightNites were right there selling LED lighting solutions from their online store.

Mark Murray’s background in electronics and a passion and affinity for the outdoors, particularly four wheel driving really guided him in designing his products. And his search for quality products and strong belief in customer service provided the basis for the business today. That philosophy has always been, and continues to be what stands LightNites out from the crowd.

Danny Dellaca purchased the business from Mark in 2013 and continues the philosophy of quality products coupled with excellent customer service. His passion for the outdoors, and in particular the boating world, gives him insight into what his clients want from his products.

Danny and the team came to my 4wd club to do a presentation on some of their LED Lighting solutions. They impressed me quite a lot on the night and so I approached Danny to see if he’d like me to review one of his products.

He was keen and so I was lucky enough to get a hold of their LED Remote Light Strip. The product specs for the LED Remote Light Strip are:

So firstly, the LED Light Strip from LightNites is bright. The one I got was a single strip of LED lights backed with 3M sticky stuff that is really, really sticky! I stuck it to a strip of aluminium so that I could move it around and decide where to put it. On our camping trip I hung it up outside above the kitchen area. It was well and truly bright enough to give us enough light to not only to cook by, but we all sat around under it and shot the breeze well into the night. In the end I decided to put it inside the camper, pop-riveted to the cross bar that holds up the tent. Although we haven’t used it there in a camping situation, I’m sure that’s the place for it.

Now I mentioned that it’s bright right? That was just up there in the previous paragraph… But the cool thing is that there are a number of pre-set settings that allow you to adjust the brightness! You can quickly jump between 100% brightness to 50% and even down to 25%. Or you can set it anywhere in between! Turn the LED Light strip off and it remembers where you set it to last! Ingenious.

And if you want your camper to be the party place, you can select from a whole bunch of funky flashy modes that range from a cool pulse to an epileptic fit inducing strobe. Not sure how useful that will really be… in a real life camping situation… Maybe you could use it at night to signal overhead planes for help… A disco in the middle of the Aussie outback is likely to attract some kind of attention right?

“Ok”, you might say, “All these modes and brightnesses and stuff are all well and good, but once I’m in my camping chair, nothing gets me out!”

Well that’s perfectly OK. Most of the LightNites products come with a remote that allows you to control the light from quite some distance away. Yeah that’s right… A remote… Yeah baby.

So you could be hanging out in your camper in your stubbies and thongs, cooking up the catch of whiting you’d managed to get yourself and sucking on a VB or a XXXX, when suddenly the woman of your dreams walks up. BAM in an instant you’ve dulled the LED light strip down to ‘Mood lighting’… If only you had Barry White on remote as well!!

Or, and much more likely, you could be flumpped in your camping chair, beer in hand, an uncomfortable silence between you and your mates, when one of them says “Gee that light is bright!”. BAM, in an instant you’ve dulled it to 50 or 25% and everyone is not only happy, but now talking about this awesome LED strip light that’s controlled by a remote… What a conversation starter!

There are only a couple of minor negatives that come to mind for me with this product. Firstly the remote is coded to the light. So if you lose the remote then that’s it… All over for that LED light. You can’t get a new remote and re-code it. I’m sure you’d be able to pull it apart and re-wire it with a physical switch but then… no instant mood lighting!

The second is that if you have a number of remote lights, say one in the camper, one over the kitchen area, one facing out beyond the awning, a few in the boat and maybe one on the car awning and even inside the car, then that’s a lot of remotes… How do you know which one is which?

Are these major issues? Not really… Just things to be aware of really. (UPDATE! Danny contacted me the other day to let me know that they now have a setup that allows a single remote to control up to 3 LED lights, and the remote is re-programmable. So if you lose one, you can get another one and re-code it to work with the lights you already have! Way to go Danny!)

So what’s the future for LightNites? I’m sure they have their ideas for the future, but I’d like to see a remote with a strong magnet built in so that you could stick it to the camper or your car or something.

Also maybe a small portable LED light that has a magnet on the bottom of it. Something that you could stick somewhere temporarily and then plug into the nearest 12v socket… And with an adjustable head to target the llight towards where you want it…

As a small business, if you’re after a specific LED lighting solution then get in touch with Danny and the crew. They’re a very approachable bunch and are more than happy to help you design a solution for your particular situation.
Want more info? Or to purchase something from them online? Check out their range of LED Lighting Solutions at http://lightnites.com/