I am sorry to hear that you had a bad experience. I have talked with Stephen Pennington (Director of Sales) on many occasions, and I have always been very impressed with not only their company, but their customer service as well. On one occasion, I took my windrestrictor off to clean behind it, and the hot wire broke off right at the LED board. While this was probably my fault, I decided to email WindRestrictor to see if they had any suggestions of how I could fix it. This was on a Saturday. On Sunday, Stephen emailed me back, and said that they would send me out a new LED strip at no charge. I was not expecting this, and was pleasantly surprised. I am not sure if they have had any recent changes at their company, but I for one am a big fan of WindRestrictor.

As far as the brightness, are you talking about 25' at night? I can tell you that mine is very very bright, and is visible at night as far as you can see the tail lights. If you are talking about daytime, they are not really designed to be very bright during the day.