Night riding is great. It allows you to keep cycling throughout the winter, experience your local trails as you never have before and learn a whole host of new skills. However, it does come with a few annoyances that, as we found on our recent lights group test, are largely caused by the lights themselves.

We decided to use our experience of testing lights to show you the quick fixes we found to make night riding as painless as possible.

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The first problem we found was that the cables were too long. To remedy this, take a pencil and wrap the cable around it until it’s at the length you need. The secure the cable to the pencil and use a hairdryer to heat it. it will take about 90 seconds on each side but make sure you don’t make the cable too hot or the plastic can split.

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When you remove the pencil, your cable should be coiled and much shorter than before. It can still be stretched though so you don’t have to worry about it snapping if it snags on something.

The second issue that annoyed us were rattly batteries. The fix for this couldn’t be simpler. Just take some foam, cut it to size and stick it to the battery. This should mean you have a much snugger fit on your top tube.