LED lights in the cabin and for Nav - film

dylanwinter said:
all old stykle bulbs now gone from KaTie L

I bought some festoon bulbs from Amazon and fitted them in the cabin and on boaw and stern



the little 12 element warm white was best
Click to expand...

An interesting video thank you for sharing it.

A couple of questions the first is about the interior lamps. Do you know the colour temperature and the Lumen output of the lamps that you purchased. Your supplier should have supplied this detail.

The second question relates to the lamp you installed in your navigation light fixture, it looked to be a cool white lamp, although viewing it via a video is not ideal. I mention this because cool white lamps are actually unsuitable for use behind red and green lenses. The light colour produced is quite unsatisfactory giving a pink hue from the red light and a blue/green light from the green element. You actually need a warm white lamp to produce the right red and green light frequencies. Cool white lamps are ideal for a clear white light as used in anchor, stern and steaming lights as the video showed very well.

Regards
 
What are the nav lights? Complete LED units, or LED lamps put into old housings? Because the angles seem all to cock - the stern visible from too far forward (though I could be wrong, bit hard to tell from the video) and the bow light as you say petering out too early on the beam. LEDs are normally quite directional, so you need a lamp that has them pointing in all directions, not all the same way.

Pete
 
The stern light does not look to bad but as Pete points out the angle of visibilily of your bicolour is rubbish.

It looks as though you have used the flat forward facing LED units that you were trying in your cabin light.

For your nav lights you need LED arrays that are visible through the correct arc


Can you confirm also that the lights have the luminous intensity to give the visible ranges required by the Colregs namely 2 nautical miles for the stern light and 1 nautical mile for the port and starboard lights?
 
Nav light

As said the LED in bow nav light was hopeless. I am confused as to why there is a white sector straight ahead when I think it should be just red and green. Because the LED source is over a large area assuming you do have 360 degree lighting LED bulb the division of sectors becomes very blurred compared to the small area of a vertical filament. I would go for individual LED P and S lamps or just stick with filament lamp in bow nav light. As for internal lights I have no problem with cold white colour but then I only use the lights to see things. good luck olewill
 
Your nav lights are completely hopeless, as others have said.

The film's interesting as it highlights the problem of trying to fit a white LED behind existing colour lenses and expecting to get green and red as you would with an incandescent bulb. LEDs don't work like that.

You should check that the interior lights don't interfere with am/fm or vhf radio; I'd guess there would be no problem because it seems only the more expensive lights have sufficiently sophisticated voltage regulation to cause interference - worth checking though.
 
Salty John said:
You should check that the interior lights don't interfere with am/fm or vhf radio; I'd guess there would be no problem because it seems only the more expensive lights have sufficiently sophisticated voltage regulation to cause interference - worth checking though.
Click to expand...

Other way round in my experience. The good ones are almost silent even close up, it's the cheaper ones with badly designed regulators which cause the problems. Though of course no regulator will mean no RFI.
 
The problem appears to be buck regulators that operate at around 1MHz. These seem to be fitted to some very expensive tri colour units.
Just last week we had a situation where a customer was experiencing complete blackout of vhf reception - voice and AIS data - whenever he turned on his £350 masthead unit.
But I'm sure cheaper units can have the same problem too.
 
William_H said:
As said the LED in bow nav light was hopeless. I am confused as to why there is a white sector straight ahead when I think it should be just red and green. Because the LED source is over a large area assuming you do have 360 degree lighting LED bulb the division of sectors becomes very blurred compared to the small area of a vertical filament. I would go for individual LED P and S lamps or just stick with filament lamp in bow nav light. As for internal lights I have no problem with cold white colour but then I only use the lights to see things. good luck olewill
Click to expand...

I suspect the reason why there appeared to be a white light dead ahead was that is was extremely bright due to the narrow directional beam from the LEDs and that the there was an appreciable over lap of the red and green sectors due to the geometry of the light source. Ie two or more rows of LEDs rather than a single vertical incandescent filament.

Dylan' experiment has at least proved beyond all doubt that ordinary cheap LED festoon substitutes are useless for navigation lights.

AFAIK, but Adrain might correct me, there is no LED festoon substitute suitable for use in an ordinary bicolour lantern The lack of visible arc can easily be overcome but not so easily , as far as I can see, the overlap of the red and green sectors.
They exist for separate port and starboard lanterns where ideally colour matched LEDs can be used or warm white ones as an acceptable alternative .

It seems a complete folly to me to start off with what wee probably expensive lanterns designed to comply with all the relevant specifications, but then stick cheap unsuitable LEDs in them and end up with something barely worth a toss
 
Nice comparison, Im currently trying led driving lights as deck lights my spreader is about 5mt and I have 1 standard 20w globe on each spreader, I have ordered an 8LED and a 12 led driving lights for a trial.
I dont think I would be changing my mast tri lights any time soon but I did like the stern light .
 
VicS said:
I suspect the reason why there appeared to be a white light dead ahead was that is was extremely bright due to the narrow directional beam from the LEDs and that the there was an appreciable over lap of the red and green sectors due to the geometry of the light source. Ie two or more rows of LEDs rather than a single vertical incandescent filament.

Dylan' experiment has at least proved beyond all doubt that ordinary cheap LED festoon substitutes are useless for navigation lights.

AFAIK, but Adrain might correct me, there is no LED festoon substitute suitable for use in an ordinary bicolour lantern The lack of visible arc can easily be overcome but not so easily , as far as I can see, the overlap of the red and green sectors.
They exist for separate port and starboard lanterns where ideally colour matched LEDs can be used or warm white ones as an acceptable alternative .

It seems a complete folly to me to start off with what wee probably expensive lanterns designed to comply with all the relevant specifications, but then stick cheap unsuitable LEDs in them and end up with something barely worth a toss
Click to expand...

You are quite right. As an emergency I fitted a warm white LED festoon to my Aquasignal red/green bow lamp-it was poor The supplier I had purchased a proper green/red LED from changed the defective unit and all is well again. Purely subjective but it looks brighter than the halogen bulb that was fitted in the unit before conversion.
 
the camera lies

the bulb was so bright that it was overcoming the camera

so it was not as bad as it looked

I am not that bothered about the view from in front

but side-ways on it was a pretty awful

and did not give the amgle is should

Dylan
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page

Top