Since I've had some time this morning, I tried to figure out what's going wrong with that pod. And meanwhile I'm sure moisture was causing the malfunction.
I removed the pod and found out that there was some humidity in the bar, maybe causing some jumper on the circuit board. As far as I could I tried to dry the unit, which made that steady burn red fade until it was totally gone.
In the end that's a bit annoying because there was no heavy rain or whatever the bar could have been exposed to. Just some light snowfall, a bit of drizzle, and most of the time the car is even parked in a garage, totally protected from wind and weather. But even if not, from my point of view such a lightbar just has to be sufficiently sealed as it needs to work even under worst conditions as well.
As I said, I’ll see how things develop, but in the end there should be a long-term solution to protect the boards from any effects caused by moisture or other foreign matter.
But with all that said, I almost do hear those voices shouting "no-name crap, what would you expect". On the other hand, a few years ago we had some Federal Signal VAMA P8000 strobe bars on two
ALS ambulance units and experienced a very similar problem with persistant water ingress. Same recently heard about many
Intav Selecta/Alcyone LED bars. So sometimes even a brand name product can perfectly flop.
What you see in the picture is not a camera deficiency, it's the color the lightheads actually showed.
