The Emergency Strobe will flash for 56 hours, well over the SOLAS time requirements. Since Puget Sound water is cold, I use Lithium batteries in my strobes.īoth strobes have three functions, Emergency Strobe, SOS Strobe and low power flashlight. Both organizations require the batteries to be changed on a regular and planned interval. I suspect this is because Lithium batteries have better cold weather performance and a bit more total power storage rating. USCG approval uses AA Alkaline batteries and SOLAS approval requires AA Lithium batteries. Coast Guard Approval and SOLAS approval is the batteries used. Yes I know that a light bobbing up and down at the surface of the water is difficult to see at best, but a bit comforting to know the new strobe lights have a nice reach with the light. With a visible range of over 3.5 miles in good weather, a person in the water in the center of Puget Sound should be able to be seen from the shore in most of Puget Sound with the Firefly PRO Series strobes. Wondering about the water activation feature, I did a quick informal test on my new ACR Firefly Waterbug, I took a spray bottle of water and soaked the ACR Firefly Waterbug with spray for several minutes and it did not activate, but when I put it under the tap, the ACR Firefly Waterbug turned on and started flashing. The Waterbug also has full manual operation in case a person is in an adverse environment and worried about accidental activation. The standard ACR Firefly PRO model needs to be manually turned on. The ACR Firefly Waterbug turns on automatically if immersed in water (if the switch is set to Auto), once started it keeps flashing until it is turned off. A flash of 0.10 second was able to be seen, but when the light was observed from the deck of a ship the light flash needed to be longer than 0.10 second so the longer duration of the ACR Firefly PRO Strobe will help a person in the water be seen easier at night. When the Fresnel lens was first developed, testing was done on flash duration and how short a flash could be seen. The ACR Firefly Pro Series Emergency Strobe light has a noticeably longer duration (0.175 second) than a standard Xenon strobe (0.000214 second), the president of the company said the longer duration was to help depth perception at close range when approaching a person in the water at night, however the longer duration light should make the light easier to see as short duration flashes are very hard to see. Most of us have seen strobes used at night and the difficulty in seeing them. Using LED’s gave the engineers more design flexibility in features and the light profile. The Classic 4F originally had an expensive mercury battery, I changed the battery to a non-mercury battery to keep the 4F working and the 4F remained my favorite and attached to the life-jacket that I wore the most.ĪCR replaced the Xenon strobe with LED’s on the Firefly PRO Series. The strobes that came after the Classic 4F just did not seem as bright, and looking at other manufactures offerings they did not seem as bright either, which left me disappointed, over the years when I needed to buy new strobes for additional life-jackets. So impressed that I bought one for myself. I found the ACR Firefly PRO Series at Fish Expo in Seattle and was quite impressed with the new Strobe Light. The ACR Firefly PRO Series is Brighter, flashes longer and has more functions (Strobe, Flashlight, SOS) than the 4F model. ACR Rescue Lite 4F & New ACR Firefly PRO SeriesĪCR has finally came out with a worthy successor to the classic Firefly Rescue Lite ACR / 4F.
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