When setting up a family size tent at a campsite, it’s almost always guaranteed of that you’ll bend a tent peg while hammering it into the ground, or tripping over a guyline. This is one of the reasons we really like the idea behind Coghlan’s heavy-duty tent pegs. Made from heavy-gauge steel these pegs penetrate even the hardest of surfaces and won’t easily bend. But in addition, they also come equipped with an LED light.

Sold in packs of two, these 10-inch long tent pegs (PN-1410) can point down to illuminate the edge of your tent or angled up (up to 45-degrees) so you can see any guylines you’ve secured to them. The LED lights are bright, but won’t keep you up if left on overnight. Powered by four button-sized batteries (LR41), the LED lights will last up to 30 hours.

To operate the LED, you simply twist it to turn it on, and untwist it to turn it off. The LED light case is made from a tough plastic, but you don’t want to accidentially miss the tent peg head with your hammer and break it. We also liked that plastic LED housing on top of the tent peg also had a hole to easily tie-off any string, cable or guyline to it.

We carried two during our field test and were used to easily spot the two sides of our 6-person family tent. The heavy-gauge steel pegs are long enough to get a firm grip, even on soft soil, and have a pointed edge to easily break into hard ground.

We found that vibrations can shift the batteries inside the LED light housing to touch the spring and momentarily turn the light on. So to ensure that the light did not turn on accidentally and drain the batteries, we completely removed the light housing from the tent pegs and kept them in a separate plastic bag until we were ready to use them.

The two-pack Coghlan kit retails around $6.00. For more information, visit www.coghlans.com.