Hunt Superdura Dynamo Disc wheelset

If you're looking at a dynamo system for your road bike then the SONdelux hub dynamo is pretty much the best out there for low resistance and weight, and it's renowned for great build quality which is matched by the rest of the components on these excellent Hunt wheels. Considering how much the dynamo costs on its own, the price is excellent too. They might be a bit much for the odd night ride, but if you rack up the miles after dark they're an investment worth considering.

• Pros: Great quality, great value, tubeless ready
• Cons: Might be overkill for many people, but that's about it

If you want to do the Transcontinental Race, or an expedition tour or similar mad adventure, you've probably looked into dynamo wheelsets, but the appeal of a dynamo system is broader than that. You'll never forget to charge your lights, and they won't run out halfway home: great news if you regularly commute on unlit lanes after dark. On top of that there are a dozen ways to use the dynamo power to charge your USB devices, of which many people carry at least one (a phone) and often more, especially on a long ride or tour.

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Maybe you're thinking that the downside is all that dynamo drag and extra weight slowing you down. Well, that's where you'd be wrong.

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Weight first: Our Superdura wheelset weighed in at 2,035g including the fitted rim tape, so a nudge under two kilos without. That's a bit more than the 1,939g quoted weight, but even so it's only about 200g more than a similarly specced wheelset without the dynamo.

These wheels are built for a bit of abuse: there's 32 spokes front and rear, and the asymmetric rim design offsets the spoke holes to even out the forces a bit on either side of the wheel. The rims have a generous 20mm internal width, which is perfect for a 28mm tyre or even something a bit bigger. Hunt uses good quality triple-butted Pillar spokes and dependable brass nipples for its wheels.

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Our wheels ran true throughout testing, and they're easy to set up tubeless, with tubeless rim tape already fitted and valves included. Front and rear hubs both feature a Centerlock disc mount, and you can run them either with quick releases or 12mm thru-axles. The freehub gets good quality EZO bearings and has a four-pawl engagement, one more than is common. There's a steel anti-bite guard to stop the cassette chewing up the freehub body which has proved to be pretty effective: there's a little bit of notching on the freehub but nothing serious.

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Delux dynamo

The SONdelux dynamo hub featured in these wheels is designed to work with modern LED headlights and, crucially, at road bike speeds. That means SON can use a 20 per cent smaller generator than its other dynamos; it isn't the most powerful dynamo available in terms of peak output but it is exceptionally well put together, smooth running and light at just 390g.

I've found the dynamo to be perfect for road riding. It generates barely any drag (SON claims it's around 0.5W when it's not drawing power), and spins for ages in the workstand; the drag from the internals is barely any more than a slightly stiff bearing when nothing's turned on.

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It easily puts out enough juice to power a light system at night. I've tried it with Supernova's E3 Pro and B&M's Lumotec IQ Cyo-T, both with a Supernova E3 rear light. Both gave plenty of light for night-time riding at a decent pace, and during the day I diverted the output from the hub, through the excellent Igaro D1 USB system, into various things: battery packs, phones, Garmins, cameras.

SON uses a pressure compensation system inside the hub to protect the hub against water ingress. With a sealed dynamo hub, pressure differences caused by temperature differentials between the inside and outside of the hub shell can draw moisture through the hub seals, so the SON has a long plastic tube wound around inside the hub shell, with a small air port on the inside of the thru-axle. When there's a pressure change, air moves through this tube more easily than through the seals, but it's long enough that water never makes it to the inside of the hub. That's the theory, anyway. I've had no issues with the hub so far and it should be a long time before there's anything to report. SON offers a five-year warranty on the hubs (including the bearings) and there's a two-year warranty on the wheels as a whole.

Good value?

So there's a lot of good quality kit in the wheels, put together very nicely. Let's talk a bit more about value. Hunt is fairly well known now for producing good quality wheelsets at a competitive price; we gave the Hunt 30Carbon Gravel Disc wheels five stars not so long ago and the lowest any wheelset from Hunt has scored is four stars. So it's got form for making good wheelsets, and generally the prices have been in line with other options. Not cheap necessarily, but good value because they're well-made. That's true here too, but a bit more so: there's some serious value going on with these Superduras.

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If you wanted to buy the bits and build these wheels yourself then that SON Delux dynamo hub sitting in the centre of the front wheel is going to cost you at least £200, right off the bat. By the time you've added the rest of the build kit you'll have made it a fair way to the £499 asking price before you've started to put them together. I costed up an ostensibly similar build at about £440 including rim tape and valves. If you did a fair bit of shopping around you could probably put something similar together for a bit less than Hunt is selling them for, but it wouldn't be that easy.

> Buyer's Guide: Tubeless wheelsets from £124 to £2,400

The truth is that most people don't have the time/skill/inclination to build their own wheelsets, but the rules of bike journalism state that the first comment will be, 'you could build them yourself for less'. So, yes, you probably could, but £60 or so seems to me like a reasonable outlay for Hunt to build them to a tight tolerance, ship them to you for free anywhere in the world, offer you a 60-day ride and return test, and warranty them for two years. Your mileage may vary.

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You can get cheaper dynamo wheelsets than this that use less expensive dynohubs that are still very good – the excellent SP-PL8, for example – and you could build one yourself using cheaper parts. But given what we have here, it's a really good value wheelset.

As a dynamo wheelset it might be overkill for your riding unless you're planning to set out on a long tour or an unsupported race, or you're going to fit them to a bike that does thousands of miles in all weathers. You can't really mark them down for that, though. That's what they're designed for, and they do it faultlessly.

Verdict

Near-faultless performance and great value: a must for your list if you're looking into dynamo power