Choosing the Correct Warning Lights for Your Truck

For owners and operators of work trucks and construction vehicles, having properly outfitted warning lights is important not only for staying in compliance with state and federal regulations, but also for reducing risks of injury and death among workers and others. Appropriate warning lights ensure that trucks are visible to other drivers on the road and also attract their attention by pulsing or flashing, increasing the chance that drivers won’t ignore them.

There is a red truck driving on the right side of the road.

Trucking can be a very dangerous occupation. According to OSHA, workers in the transportation and material moving fields accounted for the largest share of fatal work-related injuries in 2014. Fatalities in these industries grew by about 3 percent in 2014 to 1,289. That’s the highest number of fatalities in this industry in nearly a decade. Of the fatalities, drivers and sales workers accounted for two of every three deaths.

Ensuring that trucks are outfitted with appropriate lighting can help reduce these preventable deaths. According to safety experts, about 90 percent of the information needed to drive safely is derived from visual sources. To be effective, safety lights must be bright and conspicuous. Pulses and flashes help warning lights attract attention, as non-flashing lights may be easily filtered out by drivers.

There are a variety of lights truck owners can incorporate into their warning lights, including LED lights, strobes, and halogen lights. Warning lights can come in the form of lamps or light bars. Picking the right light source and set-up for your vehicle is important to ensuring the effectiveness of the lights. Because of the many products on the market (Ecco lightbars, Code 3 LED, Sho-ME strobes, etc.) determining what type of lights best fits your needs is important to ensuring you get the best product for your money.

LED Lights

LED lights have a number of advantages that make them ideal for warning and emergency lights on vehicles. In fact, many auto manufacturers are not only using them for these purposes, but also using LED lights for brake and running lights.

The biggest advantage for LED use in warning lights is that these are much brighter than traditional lights. LED lights give vehicles the visibility they need to help deter accidents. The typical LED bulb generates 50 lumens per watt, as opposed to the 10 lumens per watt generated by halogen bulbs. Even in heavy rains or snowfall, LED lights remain brighter than traditional lights.

Here is a diagram of an LED Bulb

Advances in LED technology has allowed manufacturers to create smaller and thinner LED lights, allowing them to incorporate these lights into smaller light bars and lamps, thus reducing the wind resistance these accessories generate.

Also, LED lights are more energy-efficient than other sources of light, resulting in less drain on automobile batteries. This energy efficiency can be helpful in conditions where the vehicle’s battery might easily be drained of electricity.

Another key benefit of LED lights is that they are longer-lasting than other forms of warning lights. LED lights have extended lifespans, meaning that less replacement work will be needed, thus saving truck owners time and money.

Wiring is less complicated for LED lights than for strobe lights, but LED lights are more expensive than traditional incandescent bulbs. Also, LED lights generate less heat than traditional lights, which may be a disadvantage in colder climates, as they may not be able to prevent a build-up of ice and snow on light bars and lamps in which they are installed.

Halogen Lights

Long the stalwart of warning lights, halogen lights remain an important component of many emergency light systems on vehicles.

Here are a pair of headlight bulbs.

Halogen lights are a souped-up version of incandescent light bulbs. Halogen light filaments are made of ductile tungsten, and gas in the bulbs is kept at a higher pressure than standard incandescent lights. Halogen bulbs are made of stronger materials than standard gas, so it can safely contain the higher pressure gas. Fused quartz, high-silica glass, and aluminosilicate are common materials used in halogen bulbs.

Here is an X-ray image of the fromt of a car

Halogen lights have a number of advantages. They’re small and lightweight, and also cheap products. Halogen lights don’t have to warm up; they reach full brightness as soon as they’re activated. They do get very hot, however.

Halogen lights have been losing market share to LED and other lights, but new, more efficient halogen lights which recently debuted on the market may reverse that trend.

Strobe Lights

Strobe lights produce bright flashes of light, and work well for emergency lighting applications thanks to their high visibility and ability to attract attention. Strobes typically make use of xenon flashtubes powered by capacitors that rapidly heat the xenon gas in the flashtubes, thus causing the flash. Colored gels are typically used in strobes to produce different colors. Strobes are often used in photography to create the flashes of light needed to take quality pictures.

In warning lights, strobe lights are beneficial for a number of reasons. They’re inexpensive and easy to replace, making them useful for applications where they’ll be used frequently. The brilliant flash of light that strobe lights produce immediately gets attention, which is helpful in warning lights, as being conspicuous is important.

Strobe lights tend to burn out fast, however, and they also lose a lot of their brilliance toward the end of their life cycle. Also, strobe lights are energy hogs and can take up significant battery power. In recent years, warning light manufacturers have created LED strobes, which combine many of the benefits of LED and strobe lights.

Light Bars

Light bars are an effective form of emergency vehicle light. They’re most commonly seen on police and other first responder vehicles, but many commercial vehicles have also adopted them.

The earliest form of light bars were metal bars that sat on vehicle roofs. These bars were typically mounted with rotating beacons, a siren, and stationary lights known as “lollipop” lights.

There is a police car in the dark with the siren on and the office is outside of the unit in action

As the product evolved, manufacturers began making complete light bars –  light bars that integrated the various components (sirens, flashing lights, continuous lights) of light bars into a single product. Today’s light bars are quite elaborate, and can consist of fixed, rotating, strobe, or LED lights that users can program into a variety of flash or pulse patterns.

Light bars are an economical and easy way to provide adequate warning light coverage to commercial trucks and vehicles that may require them. Full size amber warning light bars are a popular and practical solution for large trucks, whereas mini light bars such as the Code 3 PSE mini light bar work well for smaller vehicles or may augment larger light bars on big trucks.

There is a truck driver driving truck

When purchasing emergency and work vehicle lighting accessories, it pays to buy from an established leader in the industry, such as Vehicle Safety Supply. Vehicle Safety Supply, based in New York, stocks more than 10,000 lighting accessories for vehicles, and it carries respected brand name products. For truck owners and fleet managers searching for lighting products they can rely on, Vehicle Safety Supply is the dealer they can trust.

Sources: http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/nchrp/nchrp_rpt_624Appendices.pdf