Bike Rack Light Maintenance: Five Minutes, Twice a Year

Bike rack light maintenance takes about five minutes

Your rack lives outside. It goes through rain, road spray, winter salt and a lot of highway wind, and then it sits in a driveway for a month. Bike rack light maintenance is mostly just looking at the thing twice a year and before any long trip.

Here's what I actually check on mine.

Keep the lenses clean

Dirt on the lens costs you brightness, and it builds up slowly enough that you don't notice.

Wash them the way you'd wash your car — water, mild car soap, a clean microfiber cloth. That's it. Don't take a pressure washer to them, and don't use solvents or a scouring pad; the lens scratches.

The housings are sealed, so a normal wash is not a problem.

Check the cable and the connector

This is the part that actually wears out. Not the light.

Run the cable through your hand end to end. You're feeling for flat spots where it's been pinched by a hinge or a tailgate, and looking for any place the jacket is chafed through. A cable that's been closed in a hatch a hundred times will tell you.

Then pull the plug out of your vehicle's socket and look inside both halves. Road salt gets in there and corrodes the pins green. A little dielectric grease on the pins once a year keeps that from happening.

If you're not sure which plug you have or what it's supposed to carry, I wrote the whole thing up here: trailer connector types.

Tighten the fasteners

Highway vibration works on everything bolted to the back of a car.

Put a wrench on the bracket bolts and the light's mounting hardware once a season. Snug, not gorilla-tight. Our fasteners are stainless steel, so you're checking for loose, not for rusted.

Same for the bracket itself. Ours are 1/8" steel where the bracket meets the rack and aluminum at the light end, finished in a textured semi-gloss powder coat built for outdoor use — so the metal isn't usually where you'll find a problem. The bolt that backed out a quarter turn is.

Test every function before a trip

Do this in a driveway with someone standing behind the car, or back up to a window at night and watch the reflection.

• Left turn

• Right turn

• Brake

• Running lights

• Reverse, if you have it

Look at each LED, not just “is the bar lit” — a single dead segment is easy to miss and it's the thing an officer notices.

Once a month is plenty. Before a road trip is the one that matters, and after the lights have sat unused for a season.

If something isn't working

Nine times out of ten it's the vehicle side, not the light — a blown fuse, a corroded socket, or a converter box on a vehicle that needs one. Start there before you take anything apart.

If you're still stuck, send us a message. It's a small shop. You'll get a real answer from someone who built the thing.

Not running Kody lights yet?

Find the kit made for your rack on the lights by rack brand page. If we don't make one for yours, the Flex Universal straps or cable-ties to just about anything.