The Cutting-Edge Heavy Equipment Lights That Keep Sites Safer

HeavyQuip Magazine hosts an article by Gary Durian, Engineering Director for Technical Solutions at J.W. Speaker, about the light’s relevance for job sites security.

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Every worksite is constantly balancing efficiency with safety. No matter how severe, every incident means delays, liabilities, overruns, lost productivity, and, most importantly, damage to workers’ sense of safety on the job.

Heavy equipment professionals across markets have standardized practices, tools, and technologies to maintain productivity while keeping their worksites accident-free. Heavy equipment lighting naturally became part of their repertoire – particularly during the third shift, when workers can’t count on natural light.

But the concept of worksite safety has evolved. Today, it’s about more than meeting OSHA requirements: it’s about addressing visibility, communication, and efficiency on the worksite without compromising the well-being of workers. Because it’s so much more complex than it used to be, safety is the product of thoughtful planning, strong leadership, and solutions built for modern Jobsite challenges – like equipment lighting.

Emerging lighting technologies that keep workers safer

Standard halogen lighting on heavy equipment isn’t designed to mitigate the risks of a modern worksite. For starters, halogen lighting is designed to indiscriminately flood an area with light, no matter what function the equipment is performing. That can contribute to alarm fatigue (which desensitizes workers to the din of attention-grabbing beams, beacons, and beeps they’re exposed to over the course of a shift) and increased accident rates.

Bright, efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs) on heavy equipment have become the leading way to enhance visibility on worksites – and the features of well-optimized LEDs go far beyond adding light to dark areas. These are just a few types of lights that can improve safety and visibility on job sites:

• LED danger zone lights highlight unsafe areas around a vehicle or piece of machinery, clearly displaying colorful no-go zones on the ground and showing workers and other vehicles where it’s not safe to walk or drive. These LED lights can even be customized to display warning symbols to provide direct instruction to workers, rather than simply illuminating an area;
• LED work lights like the J.W. Speaker Model 526 can toggle between different color temperatures, which is critical for visibility in conditions that affect the line of sight. In dark conditions where brightness is paramount, for example, it can display a standard bright white to place light where it’s needed; and in dusty or foggy conditions, a warm white light cuts through to illuminate the path ahead.
  Sensors in LED work lights can even help operators see over hills and other terrains. By selectively illuminating individual diodes in the light’s array, they can shine in a downward direction as the equipment crests the hill, illuminating the terrain on the other side of the hill instead of shining upward in the direction the equipment is facing. It works the other way, too: if a piece of equipment is moving down a hill, LEDs can shine upward out of the ditch to throw light into the vehicle’s path and illuminate terrain and obstacles.
• LED roof bars and strobe lights shine brighter and use less energy, with multiple strobe settings and color temperatures to provide heavy equipment visibility from every angle.

Illuminating the future of worksite safety

Heavy equipment safety relies on communicating with the people and other equipment around it. With low-light conditions and employees working late shifts on many modern job sites, lighting is a critical safety factor that can’t be overlooked.

Smart, thoughtful solutions form the basis of modern workplace safety, and LEDs for heavy equipment are an essential part of the safest worksites. Whether you’re an OEM specifying work lights for a new fleet or a crew leader ordering replacement lights, you need a provider who can see into that future to keep your equipment running, your workers working, and your job sites safe.

With experience creating lighting for heavy equipment used in major industries, J.W. Speaker creates the lighting solutions of tomorrow – and never stops innovating itself to anticipate what today’s equipment needs to work better, brighter, and safer on the job.