Straight or Curved LED bar

I'm looking at doing a LED bar on my roof. 2021 Tacoma.

What is better a Straight or Curved LED Light Bar?

 

To hijack/tag along: dual flood/spot or just spot?

 

Combo Beam. Currently looking at CaliRaised 42 inch LED Bar.

 

Just my personal experience, but stay away from the CaliRaised LED bars. I had one that turned into 3 after I had to get it replaced twice due to major moisture intrusion behind the lens. It happened quickly on the 3rd one they sent me as well so I just gave up and got a non-lightbar fairing for my roof rack.

 

Depends on what you're looking for.

Straight would put more light forward where curved would spread the light pattern wide a bit more.

 

I have a CaliRaised 32 inch in my bumper and so far so good.

 

Would be for plowing at night. The Halogen lights on my plow suck... Plus somewhat for additional light on our road coming home, live up in the country and have a 3 mile road to travel on to get to our house. No street lights just plain dark...

 

That's good to hear. Hopefully you'll have the same experience with the larger one.

 

What would be an alternative to CaliRaised? I don't want to spend crazy $$$ on it... In the line of 200-300.

 

So I really thought that the CaliRaised was going to be a good value for a dependable light. I couldn't find anything really worth buying (given my experience) for less than like 1000$ so I gave up and spent 100$ on a new fairing lol. On the bright side I now have a front end loader with fogged up light bars all over it

 

Cali raised is just rebranded chinese junk. I recently replaced my $40 auxbeam light bar with a diode dynamics bar and am very pleased with the upgrade. It is a huge step up in quality from the cheapo china bars without spending a fortune.

 

Unless you are mounting the bar way far back on the roof, you want a bar with focus. Anything with an open bucket style reflector like Cali or Baja or Rigid is going to give you extreme hood glare, greatly reducing your distance vision at night, and distance vision is kinda the point of a roof bar. For that location KC Gravity Pro6 or Diode Dynamics TIR optics would be best. Those products have best in class focus to nearly eliminate the uncontrolled light spill on the hood.

Really though, the roof is a poor spot for the purpose, especially for plowing in the snow. Even with a good bar, you'll just get excessive illumination of the snow in the air with a real hard time of seeing the roadway beyond it. It would be worse than running high beams in the snow, which is blinding. If the plow lights are a problem, upgrade the plow lights. There are plenty of halogen upgrade options that can provide significantly more output out of your existing assemblies, or upgrade the assemblies. If you want to add more lights, add them near the plow lights where they are forward of the hood and preferably in a low beam pattern so you can illuminate the roadway and not the snow in the air above the cut off to have the vision limiting star wars effect.