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WHY SKY-VIEW DOES NOT USE XENON LAMPS
IN THE MANUFACTURING OF OUR SEARCHLIGHT PRODUCTS
(CLICK HERE)
SAFETY:
Per Wikipedia "In order to achieve maximum efficiency, the xenon gas inside short-arc lamps are maintained at an extremely high pressure, which poses large safety concerns. If a lamp is dropped, or ruptures while in service, pieces of the lamp enveloped are prone to be ejected at high velocity, causing large amounts of damage and harm."
Xenon lamps are under atmospheric pressure even when new, cold, and still in the original shipping container. Handling Xenon lamps requires vital safety precautions; Employees must wear protective ballistic gear when handling or replacing lamps in Xenon fixtures to prevent serious bodily injury or even death.
These precautions are not necessary when handling the 21st century technology lamps used in our AD-LightŪ searchlights. These lamps are not under atmospheric pressure and changing them does not present an explosion hazard. You can see the ever-present danger of Xenon lamps in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVpD8SWzKFM . The people handling this lamp were in the process of removing the used lamp from its packing material for a foolish "experiment"-they wanted to throw rocks at the lamp from a distance and film it exploding. As you can see, they didn't need to throw rocks; the lamp exploded merely from being handled. The NASA safety manual states that Xenon lamps must be stored in a separate room that may not be entered unless two employees dressed in appropriate safety gear do so at the same time. The second employee is required as a safety backup to help the person physically handling the lamp in case of an explosion. You can read NASA's instructions on handling Xenon lamps at
http://smad-ext.grc.nasa.gov/gso/manual/chapter_26.pdf .
OUTDATED 50+ YEAR OLD TECHNOLOGY:
Per Wikipedia "Xenon short-arc lamps were invented in the 1940s in Germany and introduced in 1951". The 4000-watt Xenon lamped searchlights consume six times more energy than the lamps used in Sky-View's AD-Light searchlight fixtures. The Xenon lamps generally require a minimum of 30 amps per fixture while operating at 208/240-volts 3-phase while the newer technology AD-Light searchlights require only 5 amps per fixture if operated at 220-volt single phase. (Note that AD-Lights typically are configured to operate at 110-volts drawing 9.8 amps.) In addition to using far less energy to operate, AD-Light lamps also produce more than double the lumens per watt than Xenon lamps. More lumens per watt give a brighter light. The arc gap of Sky-View's AD-Light lamp is much shorter than that of a 4K Xenon lamp, 3.5mm versus 7.0 mm, which also contributes to a brighter light.
WATTS DO NOT TRANSLATE TO BRIGHTNESS:
Watts do not translate to brightness; watts are only a measurement of the electrical power required to operate a particular lamp. The photo below shows a side-by-side comparison of Sky-View's energy-efficient 850-watt AD-Light searchlight (on the left) and today's 4000-watt Xenon searchlight (on the right). Because we know that a 100-watt incandescent bulb is very bright and a 40-watt incandescent bulb is dimmer, we tend to associate watts with brightness of light. However different bulb technologies produce differing amounts of light per watt. Wattage describes how much electrical power a bulb uses, not how bright it is.
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