You may be wondering what you are supposed to be looking at here but in fact the white switch in the middle of the picture is the new dimmer for the Hatteras LED lights that I have just finished installing in 'Mallards' cabin. I am very impressed with how the whole project turned out. I upgraded the existing lights some time ago by changing out the halogen bulbs for LED arrays that I made myself in an effort to reduce the amount of power consumed. They have done stirling service for the past 5 years but things have moved on greatly since those days and I wanted to upgrade the light levels somewhat and at the same time install some good looking fixtures.
Four of the surface mount versions of the Hatteras LED lights from Imtra now provide more than enough light, in fact the photo above was taken by the light of the four fittings at full power without the aid of any supplementary flash or other fill light.
This is one of the lights and you can just see the cable exiting from the rear of the unit. In fact the cable is a four wire group which provides two for the power circuit and two for the dimmer control. The light will work perfectly well without a dimmer but I wanted to be able to drop the lights for night time sailing and other times when full power is not required. Power consumption is so small that I was able to get away with 22 awg cable which means that the cable is less obtrusive than would have been the case with conventional halogen bulb where the cable would have been 18 or even 16 gauge.
Wiring was straight forward, the lights came with a wiring diagram but I know from experience that routing the cables for a neat job is the hardest part and it is this that often takes the longest and so it was in this case.
The dimmer unit will run up to 15 lights on the same circuit so my four were well within it's capabilities. Small and light I attached it to the back of the switch panel with some double sided sticky pads after I had wired it in.
Imtra do supply switches but I wanted mine to blend in with my existing panel so I installed an extra Carling switch which blended in with the adjacent switches, the white cover is to make it easier to spot in the dark.
So here below is the newly illuminated cabin, the lights are just out of shot mounted directly to the over head.
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