Adding Cabin LEDs

One of the things on my ‘non-urgent’ list was to replace all my lights with LEDs for two reasons

1) They draw 1/5 of the power

2) They are extremely relialbe.

After doing a ton of research, I finally went to http://store.marinebeam.com/

These guys have very reasonable prices on their lights, the nav lights are USCG certified to 2nm AND the whole shipment to Canada was only 20 dollars! Amazing!

I ended up getting 1 red 360, 1 green 360, a steaming/deck light combo, 2 spreader lights, a dome light, a bi-colour nav light, a stern light and two strip lights.

Here is the haul

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First thing to do was replace the light in the bathroom, since it hadn’t worked for a month.

First I took out the old CFL bulb

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This allowed me to unscrew the fitting

When I pulled out the fitting, I found that much to my surprise, the previous owner had used heat shrink fasteners like I use! He just… hadn’t heat shrunk them.

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I heat shrunk them, then attached the new wires to the old wires and jammed the whole mess back into the lining (this was a lot harder than it looked and I actually had to drill the hole a lot larger)

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And then reattached the LED bulb once I mounted the fitting

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Here is it completed. Finally, a bathroom light again!

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Then I decided to tackle the main dome light in the main cabin.

First I removed it

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Here it is on the table

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The connectors had female connectors on, so I crimped on a pair of males

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And here it is installed.

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After testing

Both LED lights are considerably BRIGHTER than the ones they replaced! And as for the power draw…

Dome Light –                Old: 1.1 amps                 New:  0.2 amps

Strip light                      Old: 0.8 amps                 New:  0.4 amps

A lot more lumens for a lot less power draw and longer life? Sounds like a no-brainer to me! The reduced power draw especially will be extra useful once I start voyaging around.

Matt

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