Why FYRLYT Driving Lights are the best value for your truck, SUV or 4x4.

June 9, 2012 - PRLog -- One of the principles that weighs heavily on the mind of all good product designers is value. This is a fairly vague concept in itself, but not so when taken with a dose of context…. I found it easiest to understand when described to me as “value in use”….
That is the total cost the consumer bears to satisfy the need, want or desire in question.

The simplest form of explanation I can offer is one where you could buy a car for 30% less than others in the same class….to the uninitiated this would represent good value until we consider the total fuel consumption and maintenance over the life of the vehicle.
Quite quickly this apparent value can look fairly sad and is always worthy of some investigation. A relatively simple concept to explain using a motor vehicle purchase as most consumers are aware of this concept as it applies to car purchases. But how does it apply to driving lights??….. More on this in a moment.

During the development phase of FYRLYT this value in use principle was used to challenge the validity of HID Vs. Halogen to determine the best “value in use” solution for the consumer as it relates to high performance driving lights. This is where the FYRLYT story really begins.

When the average market price (AUD$1,600.00) for a quality pair of HID driving lights like the Hella Predator (a favourite of mine by the way) IPF or Lightforce are considered with respect to the primary attributes (features) such as luminous flux produced, current draw and cost the story begins to unfold. The luminous flux by the way is the amount of light produced by the source (bulb) within the visible spectrum (The light we can see)….. Measured most commonly in Lumens……. This is not to be confused with Lux…… Lux in the simplest of terms is the light equivalent to pressure…. That is how much light (Lumens) are distributed per unit area….. Collectively these terms are best thought of as the Lumen being the pound and Lux, the pound per square inch. The higher the Lux the brighter the target object will be.

Now after a few hours of use a very good quality 45 watt HID (commonly advertised as a 50W by the way) will produce around 100 lumens per watt. This makes available around 4500 Lumens for the reflector to do its stuff with. The reflector, well that’s another story in its own right, more on that some other day but it’s within the scope of this document to state that the relationship between the two is of absolute critical importance in order to direct the available light into a useful format. It is also worthy of a mention at this point that the performance of a light cannot be judged by either component in isolation.

Now when we compared the potential market price point (RRP) of a Halogen driving light designed with performance and value in mind the FYRLYT team discovered it could deliver a superior light > 4500 lumens at source (5000 Lumens in fact) for $1,000.00 less than the RRP of good quality HID’s…. This was simply an outstanding discovery and result for all but the producers of HID’s.

So where does this leave the current draw argument?
When you compare the typical 50w HID which draws 50 watts and delivers 45w to the bulb, we find that the typical installation of two lights will draw 8.33 amps on a 12 volt system. This is 16 amps less than the FYRLYT 5000 lumen…. this is a lot you say…but is it good value?...The net effect of all of this is you have typically payed AUD$1,000.00 more for HID’s to save 16 amps  when compared to the FYRLYT 5000 Lumen driving light, and for less performance to boot.

roken down to the simplest of terms HID light manufacturers and marketers believe that paying AUD$1,000.00 for 16 amps or $62.50 per amp represents good value….. We beg to differ.

So what does this mean in an applied situation…? …By this reasoning a HID manufacturer would be retailing a 90 amp alternator at $5,625.00   ($62.50/amp x 90amp) I couldn’t imagine sales booming at that price, none the less now that FYRLYT has emerged that is what they are in fact selling in the absence of hyper output to justify the cost.

If you’re reasoning for HID driving lights is twofold, hyper performance and an increase in available current to apply to other tasks I suggest you take that $1,000.00 dollars wasted on HID and apply half of it to a larger alternator and you will get yourself an additional 100 amps of available capacity compared to a trivial 16 amps and still have $500.00 left over to spend on something to plug into it.

If you are after performance you are paying a lot ($1,000.00 more) for 20% less than the hyper performance of FYRLYT halogen, hardly a good value proposition.  

It is important to note that 300 watts of draw on most modern cars is well within their capability. In fact I have a 1976 FJ45 affectionately labelled as FUGLY on our Facebook page that has been running the first prototypes for some time faultlessly off a 55 amp alternator. So if you are after pure performance you will pocket a full $1,000.00 saving on the standard vehicle, either way you are miles in front.

By either measure, be it performance or amp draw HID’s fail to deliver value when compared to Halogen designed well. It is important to note at this point that on average HID’s will lose 25-30% of their output per watt over the life of the bulb…. This would put the average output over the life of the bulb for a 50 watt unit around 4000-4300 Lumens give or take, difficult to justify $1,000.00 extra..….. for less performance when compared to the stable output of a quality halogen system producing 5000 lumens.

In defence of HID it does possess a subjective characteristic (colour) that has perception value, and as such is beyond the scope of this document…. Colour is purely a matter of opinion and FYRLYT is not in the business of debating matters of opinion only matters of fact. We will leave that matter for discussion at the bar or around the 'campfyr'.

Here is a quick interview with the creators of FYRLYT, Paul Alisauskas and David Holmes.

http://youtu.be/gEf7ggPN1qc?hd=1