A lighthouse is a tall tower, building, or another type of structure intended to project light from a group of lamps or globes through a series of lenses and used as a navigational aid for maritime pilots or mariners at sea or on inland waterways.

Lighthouses are used to mark treacherous coastlines, hazardous shoals, reefs or indicate a safe passage for vessels entering a shallow or dangerous channel.

Since the invention of the Argand lamp in 1782, which revolutionised lighthouse illumination with its steady smokeless flame in the late 17th century. The next advancement was the vapourised oil burner that was invented in the early 1900’s; it gave an output of over six times the luminosity of traditional oil lights. This technology was used from 1900 to around the 1960s until the introduction of electric lighthouses.

The electric-filament lamp, which came into use in the 1920s but wasn’t adopted until the mid-1900s the lamp is now the standard illuminant in most lighthouses today. Most lamps are of the tungsten-halogen type for better efficiency and longer life but still require multiple globes for redundancy.

Onshore lighthouses are powered by mains electricity. However, offshore lighthouses are typically powered by diesel generators, producing electricity for the lighthouse and associated equipment. Where the absence of lighthouses keeper or easy access a redundancy backup system would need to be installed, automatically switching over to a secondary generator in the event of the first system failing.

Helicopters are most commonly used for the servicing and maintenance of offshore lighthouses, towers or lanterns while the most efficient and effect option, they can still be expensive to operate and can increase maintenance budgets. In situations where diesel generators are still in use, vessels are required once or twice a year to refill diesel generator tanks.

In modern automated lighthouses, the traditional system of rotating lenses is often replaced by a high-intensity LED light source that emits brief omnidirectional flashes (concentrating the light in time rather than direction). Sealite offers the most advanced LED light source for lighthouse available on the market today.

The benefits of LED light sources are tremendous, they significantly reduce power consumption, offer an extended life span preventing globe or bulb changes. They can be powered by solar “green energy”. The LED Light source reduces maintenance and helicopter operations expenses and can be retrofitted into original Fresnel lenses.