What power strobe to be seen in daylight

Can anyone here in s.e.l. please advise me.

I want a large warning light to come on inside my house when a car
drives up and triggers my pathway alarm. I can't have an acoustic
alarm.

At first I used a floodlight with a 500W halogen bulb.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31FXTR3S4QL._SS400_.jpg

Unfortunately, it wasn't very noticeable in bright daylight. So I went
and bought this 20W mini strobe but it's far, far too weak to be seen
easily. (I'm in the UK where daylight is not often dazzlingly
bright.)

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=28569

So I figure a more powerful strobe. What sort of power would it have
to be for it to be mounted in an interior hallway and flashing light
be noticed in one of the (smallish) side rooms?

I don't expect anyone to be facing the strobe head when it goes off so
they wouldn't be able to observe it when it flashes.

 

In <>,

Those probably work fine through common indoor artificial lighting
levels of schools, hospitals, offices and retail spaces - up to 2,000 or
2500 lux or so, my guess.

But if one is going to work in direct sunlight and want a strobe to be
visible, there are 2 solutions:

1. Add strobes so that at least one strobe is forward or diagonally
forward of one's face for all common working positions. Some of these
strobes may be "slave flashes" available from photo equipment shops.

2. Get some big monster of a strobe having energy level around or over
500 watt-seconds (joules) and a "slave flash" mode, and deploy it and one
of the "fire alarm strobes" in a manner such that the big monster is
triggered by one of the "fire alarm" ones.

The "Big Monster" should be one picked out from testing at a suitable
photo equipment shop. Bring a "fire alarm" strobe to the shop and see
what big ones have slave flash mode and ability to flash at full or a
fairly high flash energy setting with flash rate of your fire alarm
strobe.

A Photogenic "Powerlight 1500SL" "monolight" (or whatever supersedes
that) at 1/2 or 1/4 of "full blast" has a good chance of flashing that
frequently with flash energy level describable by 125-250 watt-seconds.
With a suitable reflector, that is probably fairly easy to notice in a
home area with sunlight coming in.

A "monolight" is a unit not requiring a separate "power pack". The term
"monolight" is used mainly/only for things big enough for a "separate
power pack" to be a "design option".

If something like a Photogenic "Powerlight 1500SL" is not big enough,
then the next major step up is Speedotron "Black Line" or anything similar
by competitors. That sounds to me like a couple kilobucks for a strobe.
And I do not actually know that "slave flash" is available - but when the
budget gets that big, I expect it to be easy to come up with a way to
trigger it for use as an "alarm strobe", fair chance with an oscillator of
a kind that can be made with a 555, a comparator, an op-amp, a
Schmidt-trigger inverter, or 2 transistors.

- Don Klipstein ()

 

Buy something that isn't mickey mouse from RS

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or

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