Home Emergencies Demand A Lighted Sign

When a fire breaks out or someone suffers a very serious medical condition or injury, a call is often placed out to emergency services requesting fire trucks and ambulances. Skilled though these emergency crew may be, the difficulty of their work is compounded by the problem of locating the home. If the emergency takes place at night, the emergency crew will have great trouble seeing addresses and numbers that help pinpoint the house.

This is where an address sign with some sort of reflective lighting or even powered lighting shaves precious seconds and minutes off the arrival of an emergency crew. The reflective type do not require power but rather use the ambient light produced by surrounding street lamps or the glare of emergency crew vehicles. The powered lights fall either into the battery category or via solar-powered cells.

Requirements

The basic requirements are that the lettering or numbering is either contrasting and reflective, or lighted up. Not only lighted up, but sufficiently bright to be visible at a distance of 150 feet away. The correct size for the vertical height is about 4 inches which makes it sufficient visible from the street where the emergency crew are located up to 150 feet away. Firefighters will tell townspeople that they need the sign to be visible from many angles, not just head-on!

Reflective Signage

There are two kinds of reflective signs: aluminum or paper adhesive. The aluminum type has the advantage of being long-lived and durable, but are obviously heavier and require custom-work to get the right letters and numbers. The paper adhesives are more flexible: just buy a pack and arrange the lettering how you would like it. The Spotlights collection is one example of an adhesive type that goes well on either the house itself or the mailbox. Aluminum signs generally are made by individual companies and come in single panel or multi-panel versions, the latter being able to hold numbers for several homes allowing neighbors to aggregate their resources.

Electrically Powered Signs

Reflective signs are good but hampered by the fact that the emergency crew has to shine a spotlight or headlight onto the sign in order for the reflectiveness to be effective. The answer is to get an electricall powered sign. Almost all electrically powered signs work off solar energy by recharging a nickel-cadmium or lithium ion battery that is stored inside the sign. In the morning tiny panels absorb energy, store it, and release it at night. The Moonrays product line is plaque-post example of this concept, with the lighting directly inside and behind the letters.