What’s the best way to to be visible to drivers on Halloween – and on other dark nights? Many Halloween safety tips suggest flash lights, glow sticks or safety reflectors as equally viable options. We wanted to figure out how bright glow sticks from the local supermarket are compared to our funflector safety reflectors. This is what it looks like along a highway:
This is what we used : a thin multicolored glow necklace, a thick pink glow stick on a string, a thick green glow stick with a sword’s handle attached to it, 4 reflectors and two funflector wraps.
Interesting observations on glow sticks and safety reflectors:
- When there are no cars around, the reflectors sometimes catch the light from a nearby traffic light. That’s why they give a reddish glow.
- In the video, you can see how the light from passing cars only light up the lower half of the kids. That’s why it’s important to have reflectors low down. And you must have noticed the benefit of letting the reflectors dangle!
- What you cannot see in the video is that the green glow stick, which was the brightest one, lasted less than 4 hours. The pink one had stopped glowing the next morning. The necklace, which only lid up half way around, kept glowing for several days. But you might have noticed that the necklace did not glow strongly enough to show up show up in the video…
- Glow sticks are fun for kids to play with and they did light up a corner of a dark room. But, for traffic safety, you need to make sure they are significantly brighter than those we got.
- Sadly, we now have a pile of glow sticks to add to landfill. The safety reflectors can be put on jackets and backpacks and provide safety for the whole dark season.
Happy Halloween!
The funflector team
