How Bright is to Bright

[tshayes]

I wanted to get some peoples opinions about what should be done about the level of brightness todays emergency lights are reaching. I am talking about the new whelen linear LED for example. This thing is so bright a blind person could see it. I am always for new technology but the thought that whelen and other companies are working on brighter lights than this is ridiculous. Your thoughts and impressions with todays new technology of warning lights is much welcomed.

[District821]

As far as I am concerned there is no such thing as too bright when you are talking about warning during daylight hours. During the day the more light intensity the better, even with 10 or more lights on the back of a rig they still are not near as bright as sunlight. Also I personally want all the warning power I can get going to a call even at night.

Having said that, the latest generations of strobes and LEDs are far too bright to be run at full power at most scenes at night. I know that Whelen, Code 3, Federal Signal, and Tomar all have low power modes for their strobe power supplies and Whelen has put a low power mode on the power supplies for the new remote Linear LEDs for just that reason. You can get a photocell from Whelen to turn on the low power mode automatically for $100.00 or just train your drivers.

[Fire304]

I was coming up on a fire scene last month and damn near ended up in the ditch. We rounded a curve there was a PD unit blocking the road, he had one of the newer Whelen Edge all strobe light bars with the "traffic miser" patern going. It was so bright and there was no "off" time to be able to see anything besides blue. Its coming to the point where NFPA or some other body is going to have to require automatic dimmers, like the requirement to turn off all white flashers when the brake is set.

[Dave1983]

I'm not sure if it's a problem with intensity as much as rate of flash. That's been a concern with strobes since they changed from the old double flash to the new multi-flash units. Same thing with LED's.