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
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
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.
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)
And then reattached the LED bulb once I mounted the fitting
Here is it completed. Finally, a bathroom light again!
Then I decided to tackle the main dome light in the main cabin.
First I removed it
Here it is on the table
The connectors had female connectors on, so I crimped on a pair of males
And here it is installed.
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.
