LED Anchor Light?

A while back I purchased 3 cabin LEDs from Ultraleds, During their first season, after little actual use, 2 started to flicker badly. Ultraleds told me that these lights had only 3 months guarantee but their later offerings were 2 years "and were much better". Take your choice, but given the difficulty of getting to a TriLight, I'd look for a good claimed life or guarantee, at least it suggests some confidence in the product.
 
The anchor light post is on the dead side of my boat when anchored on the river with bow pointing upstream and I am a little financially embarassed, so I made my own.

White 21/5w stop and tail LED bulb fitted into a cheapy LED Garden Solar Light Enclosure, terminals soldered together so both portions light together, solder an earth wire to the casing with bullet connectors for both pos and neg.

Fit my boathook in the live side rod holder, string the wire from the battery round the pole, connect up the connectors and connect the crocodile clips to a convenient battery feed.

Uses next to no current, rigs in 30 seconds, the visible light unit is considerably larger than my OEM lamp and is almost double the brightness.

Used it all this season with no problems, cost in total was about £2 for the solar light, a fiver (trade) for the bulb and maybe 30 mins to make it.

.....And no more holes cut into the boat for sockets etc.

However it appears that I have digressed, sorry.

I should say that I bought a Marine LED bulb for my OEM anchor light at a boat jumble, I was a little disappointed with it, it was nowhere near as bright as the original bulb and I doubted it would have been seen at 2 miles. Cost me damn near 30 quid too.

I think my advice would be to avoid the cheaper ones on ebay.
 
Last edited:
Quote Tinkicker: "I am a little financially embarassed, so I made my own."

I'm with you boy......no work for nearly a year!

I did something similar, bought a ring of LEDs with long cable from Malthouse on this forum (designed to go around a shroud I believe), home-made base and a lens from a glass pot originally a Tesco trifle left over from the kids. The pot fits nicely over the ring of lights, held by foam draught extruder strip around the base (weather has now stuck it quite firmly to the foam) and visible for miles. Upside is if I forget to turn it off - so what? It uses next to nothing in current.
 
yep, just installed the NASA one, about 2m up from the deck.

vvv bright, 0.18 A :-)

comes with a stalk, this fits in the supplied fitting very tightly.
but, in no time can you file out the fitting to make it an easy one to remove without unscrewing it.
then you can screw the fitting down and remove the anchor light for sailing, so the sheets don't catch on it.

then order:

http://www.reuk.co.uk/buy-LIGHT-DARK-SENSOR-CIRCUIT-LOW-CURRENT.htm

to switch it on and off
 
Another vote for Ultraled, I bought one of these UTRI4WW and fitted it in March this year, it's very bright, but blue-ish and runs at just over 1/3 amp. I'm much more likely to use it just because it takes so little power.
 
Ian_Edwards said:
Another vote for Ultraled, I bought one of these UTRI4WW and fitted it in March this year, it's very bright, but blue-ish and runs at just over 1/3 amp. I'm much more likely to use it just because it takes so little power.
Click to expand...


Can one substitute the standard incadecent nav light bulbs for leds? or would the bluish tint change how the red and green look?
 
Can one substitute the standard incadecent nav light bulbs for leds? or would the bluish tint change how the red and green look?
Click to expand...

There have been lots of threads about this one.

Consensus sems to be that

a) LEDs give the incorrect colour
b) The cut off for a bi-colour bow light or Tri-colour masthead may not be compliant due to the original bulb having a vertical filament to produce effectively a point source of light. The LED substitutes do not have this effect.
 
Aeolus said:
I bought a replacement anchor light bulb from http://www.searolf.com/ about a year ago. So far it's been excellent - very bright and very visible.
Click to expand...

Me too - fitted to the aquasignal combined white and tri. Perfectly happy with it. At the time it was much cheaper than any other LED but the prices seem to have come down.
 
Leonidas said:
Can one substitute the standard incadecent nav light bulbs for leds? or would the bluish tint change how the red and green look?
Click to expand...

I tried my white LED in the tricolour and it gave a very weird coloured green sector so I replaced the incandescent. The local chandlery now stocks three sector jobbies with red, white and green LEDS in the same bulb. These would probably work better but I'd like to see one in action behind a filter before handing over £40.
 
Just read an article in the latest RYA magazine where they are 'slagging off' LED lights, a very negative article sadly, I am rather surprised as I'd have thought they should be encouraging new technology. Maybe it's coz they didn't think of them!
 
Not quite the answer you are looking for, but there are several stand alone LED anchor lights on the market, including the Triton, which was my first basic design.

Power is use is minimal, and I can vouch that the Triton can be seen for over 2 nm, with a very bright white light.

I do have an interest in the Triton, but there are several other stand alone anchor lights worth looking at.
 
planteater said:
I tried my white LED in the tricolour and it gave a very weird coloured green sector so I replaced the incandescent. The local chandlery now stocks three sector jobbies with red, white and green LEDS in the same bulb. These would probably work better but I'd like to see one in action behind a filter before handing over £40.
Click to expand...
I do a lot of night sailing and see quite a lot of weird greens (and reds). The trouble is that the weird green tends to wash-out and look like a white from a distance which can be very confusing. I would not have thought you would get a weird green by fitting an LED to a conventional lens assembly as the filter should only pass the correct coloured light. That might reduce the intensity but not the colour? Odd but I take your word for it. Maybe the marine filters are not very good and rely on the tungsten characteristics for part of the colour?
 
But that's the problem, and why the RYA are against LED nav lights. An LED showing through a coloured lens doesn't give a true representation of the colour, you get a weird effect.
Stand alone anchor lights are fine - they can give a very pure white light through a clear lens or through no lens.
 
LED Anchor Light

I too have used ultraled LED Anchor light (and all other nav lights) for the last 3 years or so. They have been used a fair bit and are all still working fine. Their cabin lights, on the other hand, are both expensive and unreliable. We now carry tungsten cabin light bulbs for use when we have shore power. and LEDs when we don't.

An electronic engineer pal told me that leds can fail as a result of sweat, grease etc from one's grubby fingers when handling them. I now use a cloth to handle them and this does seem to have reduced the rate of failure in our cabin bulbs.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page

Top