On a small boat one of the greatest consumers of electricity is lighting and anything that can be done to reduce this consumption places less strain on the battery. On my boat I do not have shore power so even when at the dock I still need to be careful about the amount of electrical power that I consume. Just to prove how much power is used by electric lighting I constructed the test bed shown below. Essentially it represents two boats with modest electric demands and consists of red and green navigation lights, a stern light, mast head anchor light and finally one interior light. Those on the left are all LED and on the right the same combination of lights but incandescent.
Power is run through a typical Blue Sea breaker panel with power supplied by a wet deep cycle battery which I made sure was fully charged before the test. The traditional navigation lights are from Hella and the LED versions from OGM which in case you were wondering are USCG approved.
The results speak for themselves. While the incandescent bulbs consume 4.7 amps the LED's use only 1.4 amps, three and a half times less. As more lights are added the differential gets even greater so say a modest cruiser has 8 to 10 interior lights which are all on at once then you would be drawing approximately one fifth of the power from the battery. LED lights also put out far less heat which in the sort of weather we have been experiencing recently is a big consideration thus keeping the cabin interior cooler. There are other benefits too, although the initial cost of the LED fittings is greater at the outset they have a useful lifespan of 50,000 hours so are unlikely to ever need replacing so there is a payback time which could be as short as 3 to 4 years given the cost of replacement bulbs for many of the traditional lights. Another consideration is that battery capacity is normally calculated based on the likely current draw and given that lighting is often the biggest factor the battery bank can be smaller and thus cheaper and lighter in weight. Essentially it is a win win all round. If building a boat then I feel that it makes sense to go straight into using LED's from the outset but reequipping an older boat or a boat that is already outfitted with traditional bulbs can be expensive so one approach is to replace bulbs with LED's as they wear out or 'blow'. I have had very good results with the Sensibulb from Sailors Solutions which I have mentioned on this blog before available with BC adapters in many cases they can be used as a straight replacement for regular bulbs with no need to change the actual light fitting itself. Indeed the two reading lamps are both Ocean series from Imtra and I merely swapped out the halogen bulb for the Sensibulb.
The pictures above show the bell reading lamps, the top one with an earlier version of the Sensibulb and the bottom with the same light fitted with the supplied halogen bulb. The halogen bulb gets so hot it canb actually burn if touched as about 90% of the electricity it consumes is converted to heat rather than light.
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