I’ve been big fan of LED lights for many years. I love that to all intents and purposes they have essentially an almost indefinite life and that makes them an almost fit and forget item but pushing them over voltage will damage them and lead to their demise. Fortunately this is hard to do during the normal course of events but not impossible especially when running a 24 volt system and the battery charger is pushing out close to 28 volts . For sometime now I have been slowly replacing all the incandescent bulbs with LED’s and while in some cases the whole fixture has been changed as part of an all out upgrade of the boat’s interior — more on that later — other fixtures have benefited from merely swapping the bulb.
The light I’m holding in my hand here is a direct replacement for the 15 or 25 watt bulbs so often found on older boats reading and dome lights. I hate to quote a model number and then you order one as there are so many options to choose from. Not only are there myriad types and sizes of fittings but there are also choices when it comes to color temperature. This has nothing to do with how hot a bulb gets but refers to the hue of the light cast. The higher the number the cooler the light will appear. A cool white-often best for exterior applications, will have a temperature of about 6000 while a warm white, better for cabin interiors will be somewhere in the 4200 range.
LED’s tend to cost a fair bit more than an average incandescent so changing all the bulbs at once can be significant depending on the size of the boat and the number of fixtures.
when looking for complete fittings I have found Imtra https://www.imtra.com/ excellent both in terms of choice and customer service but for those times when seeking a bulb I favor SuperbrightLED https://www.superbrightleds.com who offer a collosal choice with fast turnaround.
Below you can see a comparison of a traditional bulb with an LED identical in almost every way save the actual light source, which in the traditional bulb on the left is hot wire that glows within a sealed sphere of inert gas and the LED which should be thought of a light source rather than a bulb in the traditional sense.
If you are not convinced of the benefit of LED consider that 50,000 hour usable lifespan mentioned earlier and also the power consumption which is typically on fifth of a conventional bulb. About 90 percent of the power consumed by a traditional bulb is converted to heat so it warms the cabin a fair bit while producing light, almost as a byproduct. LED’s convert almost all energy to light with next to no heat generated, a significant consideration if you do a lot of boating in warm climates.
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