The flashlight is 2.5 kg, 340 mm long and 160 mm in diameter. Wearable Lights: The Pelican manufacturer offers a hands-free light (#2680 "Headsup Lite") that is ideal for recovery professions who have their hands full dealing with emergencies and other demanding, and the last thing they need is to have to fiddle with off-and-on switches, and worry about battery staying power.

The light is an LED flashlight that puts out the illumination of a high performance incandescent -- and yet the manufacturer claims the Headsup doesn't project those "dark spots and irregular beam pattern" which are part and parcel of most standard filament lamps. How are they able to produce a clear, clean flood of light with no shadows? The Headsup (and other Pelican lighting products) offers what they call "recoil LED technology," which means the LED light is pointed backwards onto a reflector, so all available light is used, they claim. No "peripheral projection."

The head-fitting light (6 volts) weighs just .263 kg, uses 4 alkaline "Double A" (AA) batteries, and claims that the head-fitting light apparatus gets 33 hours of service from one set of batteries.

Best Bulbs are LEDs: According to an article in Do-It-Yourself Retailing (Feb. 2005), LED bulbs "typically run 10 times longer on the same amount of energy and are vibration and shock resistant." Further, the article continues, LEDs do not rely on heat to conduct electricity, and most power loss "in standard bulbs is due to heat." The heavy recovery people have recognized these facts, and a more and more turning to LED bulbs.

Batteries for Trucks: Of course, big rescue and towing vehicles all come with generators, and that will be covered in this paper; but batteries will always be important, even critical, to men who operate trucks and machinery that must start when needed. In Electric vehicle Online Today, the writer reports that Delphi Corporation puts out a battery that is "proven to outlast other brand name competitors."

Specifically, the Delphi "Freedom" battery, designed for "heavy-duty trucks," will outlast "average" competitors by 30% (in other words, lasts nearly one-third longer), and outlasted the "top...

Delphi doesn't say what that "top competitor" was, but the company hired an independent firm to test more than 5,000 batteries from seven regions, and the battery they push features, according to the article, "a wrought lead-calcium grid design with plastic bottom boarders." The key to the design is that it resists damage due to vibration, according to the article.
Generators: The generator that is free-standing has an advantage over a built-in truck generator because it can run all night on the same fuel that an idling truck engine burns in a couple hours. In fact, Big Rig Products -- a fairly typical generator supplier -- claims that one of its generators "saves enough fuel to pay for itself in a year"; not to mention, a savings on wear and tear of the heavy recovery vehicle's engine parts; one hour of idling for a rig can translate to 100 miles of highway driving. And when a heavy recovery crew needs power, a small, powerful, stand-alone generator is absolutely the answer (a 2-cylinder diesel engine, water-cooled, runs entirely independent of the rig's existing system.)