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Tried red and green LEDs on my shop panel, and a customer could not tell which breaker was tripped
Last month I wired up a little test panel in my garage in Fresno to show a client how the breakers work, and I used a red LED for on and a green LED for off because that is what came in the kit. The guy stared at it for a good 20 seconds and then asked me which one was lit, and I realized both lights looked like the same dull dot to him. I grabbed my phone, took a black and white photo of the panel, and sure enough the red and green dots turned into the exact same shade of gray, which is basically what his eyes were doing. What got me was that I had built this whole thing to be helpful and it made his problem worse, since now he had two lights he could not tell apart instead of one clear switch. I went back and swapped the green for a blue LED that same week, and I also added a tiny label under each light that says ON and OFF so it does not matter what color shows up. Cost me about $4 in parts and maybe 20 minutes, way less than the callback would have been if he had flipped the wrong breaker later. If you are putting any kind of indicator light into a panel or a form or a chart, does the thing still make sense in a black and white photo? Because that test caught me flat footed and I use it on everything now.
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