Let There Be Light!
After getting a lot of reaction to my last post on our rapidly growing to-do list, I thought some updates were in order. One of the jobs we knocked off over the last couple days was upgrading the lighting in the boat and let me tell you it has made a HUGE difference. As anyone who has ever been camping understands, not feeling like you can light up your space once the sun goes down really adds to the sense of roughing it. And roughing it is definitely not the goal here.
Starting Point: A Dog’s Breakfast
When it comes to lighting, we inherited a real mixed bag. The interior of our boat has about 50 individual light sockets and when we started it seemed none of them had any rhyme or reason to how they were filled. We found some really old halogen bulbs. We found some reasonably new LED bulbs. We found a whole spectrum of different shades (pun intended) over and above the required red for use at night. And then we found a bunch of empty sockets further adding to the craggy ole’ boat feel.
No it’s not mood lighting, the red-light mode preserves night vision when inside during a night watch.
From the day we moved on board this has been driving me absolutely nuts because there are few things I hate more than those god-awful ‘daylight white’ bulbs that make you feel like you’re living in an operating room (about half the boat had those), unless it’s those old school halogen bulbs that get as hot as the sun and burn about as much energy (the other half of the boat had those). Apparently I’m more OCD on this front than any other member of the crew.
On the bright side (yes another pun), this did give us entry into a whole home school lesson on the reason why those old halogen bulbs really suck which covered everything from conservation of energy to how diodes work, well the light-emitting kind anyway.
Left: Example of a halogen bulb inhabiting about half our light sockets. Middle: Examples of a couple different older LED bulbs, those resistors and capacitors look huge! Right: Our new lights encapsulated in silicon so no corrosion issues to worry about.
The Project: Everything is Harder on a Boat
Unlike living in a house where a nice, steady, even supply of electricity is a given, most systems on our boat run off a 24V battery bank. This is important because 12V is the standard that’s most common in North America for battery driven electronics (maybe more to come on that later, but the lights are enough geeking out for one post). So complication #1 was making sure whatever replacement bulbs we ended up ordering wouldn’t end up frying as soon as we plugged them in.
Next, we really wanted to avoid changing out any of the light fixtures themselves since that would turn this small fix into a much, much bigger, more expensive, and more headache inducing fix. That meant we needed to find new bulbs to fit what was already installed. Initially we were a little concerned after finding a box of inherited spare halogen bulbs in the inventory which must have contained at least 5-6 different types of bulbs, but after a little research realized that any LED bulb with a G4 base would work just fine (4mm between the pins shown in the picture above).
So at the end of the day, like a lot of things recently the best thing to remove this thorn in my side ended up being Amazon.com. After narrowing down the criteria for what we needed, it was pretty straight forward to find a couple different LED bulb options and select one at random to test.
The Result: Hallelujah This Boat Feels A Lot More Homey
Fast forward a few days and we’ve had a successful test of our randomly selected new LEDs, selected the one we liked the best, and ordered enough to replace all the interior boat lights. For about $60USD we were able to cut our boat’s power consumption dramatically (our entire boat now uses as much electricity as just two or three of those old halogen bulbs used to), plus make this place a much, much brighter and look much, much more inviting (no office space lighting here).
All in all, another item knocked off the to-do list, a big improvement in the comfort of our surroundings, and not very expensive at all as far as boat projects go. If you haven’t already done this in your home, boat, or RV, what the heck are you waiting for!
