power consumption

Could you send me the certification details. There site contains no certification information. All the companies with known LED certified products make available this information.

I can not find any reference to any LAB, certification body or certification number. I also can not find any reference to significant patents or trademarks claimed on the web site. The info on the site is general and even spelt wrong USCG COLOREGS instead of USCG COLREGS

There is one press release that concerns only an ANCHOR light and still does not have the number or lab details.



Their claims below are odd as well. Since the <50m rules state at least 3 miles for every light not 2nm.


[ QUOTE ]

Colored LED bulbs satisfy all brightness, distance (2 nm), and arc requirements set forth by the

US Coast Guard for vessels less than 50m (165 ft.) in length

* White LED bulbs satisfy all brightness, distance (2 nm), and arc requirements set forth by the

US Coast Guard


[/ QUOTE ]

Even if they do have certification, which I doubt, being certified to be the minimum standard does not make you anywhere near the equivalent of a 25W filament bulb.

2nm requires 4.3cd of light, 3nm requires 12cd and 5nm requires 52cd.
A standard 25W bulb is between 30 to 48cd and even a 10W bulb is 12 to 20cd.
So not worth considering as a comparison



The reason I doubt it is that after spending the money to be certified by an independent LAB no company would ignore that expenditure and not want to advertise it.

Prove me wrong please.
 
who are you?

do you have a vested interest in wanting boaters to continue with tungstun bulbs.
were doing our bit to save the planet by sailing when we can, not motor sailing everywhere.

play fair!
 
No, am an just a sailor/engineer that has seen too much stupidity and cons in yachting electronics.


I missed the statement: "To the eye it appears brighter"

This is a fallacy. A LED is a tiny point source that focuses onto the retina in a small spot. A filament is about 12mm long and so focuses to a strip on the retina.

The first point is STOP looking at high power point source lights with your eyes. It is not a good practice.

Compare a 3 stack LED with a filament. Assuming a generous 0.5mm spot for the LED (the lens is far from perfect) the light source is concentrated at least 8 times.

Therefore looking at a LED at close range will always look brighter than a long filament.


So I agree the ship lookout will see a brighter light as your mast head smashes against the bridge window. But at any real distance the size of the source will make no difference and the LED will be dimmer by miles (that is nm).


Please be safe and stop trusting what is on the internet. Unless it is sold through a company in the UK that can supply all the certification details it is a con. There are enough people out their who would gladly distribute a wonder light if it were true.

Again, comparing a product that makes the minimum standard to the "de facto" yachting standard of the 25W filament bulb is dangerous. If you want to hide then use 2nm bulbs if you want to survive use 25W bulbs.

I wonder how many crew will check what is in the lights before setting off in others boats?
 
"our bit to save the planet "

Now that argument is nutty. The costs of all the manufacturing, silicon processing and marketing makes the product about £100 for the equivalent light output of a 25W bulb.

So at a generous 50p per kWh that is 200kWh. It takes 40 hours to use 1kWh so that is 8000hours for a pay back.

1.8 years of continuous sailing!! /forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif
 
My answer to all this stuff, is BIG bright bulbs! I want to be seen!! If it costs more in energy, so be it, I will just have to make allowance for it!
As for the "doing my bit for global energy useage" rubbish, well, it's just rubbish!
 
The Danish Lopolight products, with LEDs mounted in epoxy and aluminium, looked excellent when I saw them at the Paris boat show. Their website (www.lopolight.com) claims "approved worldwide 2006 CE MCA USCG RINA DMA" Prices are high but so is quality. Has anyone out there used them or tested them?
 
They look good. Although trying hard to get approvals the can only claim it on a few models.

The seem also to claim <50m boat with only 2nm range!

Their 5nm light is the one I refer to as taking 21W for an equivalent 25W bulb. (Still no approval though)

Anyway the smaller approved ones still only conform to the minimum 1nm and so is in no way a comparison to a 25W bulb that in a steaming light will make 5nm.

Very nice products, for inland waterways etc. but who would ONLY want to be seen at 1nm by a ship? They are travelling 20knots so that is 3 minutes to contact. Going around with lights that dim in the Channel is the equivalent of jumping out from behind bushes in front of cars.
 
This is all quite interesting - especially as LEDs are the new "Big Thing" ...

I've not been tempted to put LEDs in for nav lights cos we don't do enough night sailing to worry - and anyway the other electrics have always consumed more power than the nav lights ...

Forget the steaming light - if you've got that on then you must be running the engine ... so plenty of power (if you haven't bust your alternator!) ..

At 2 Amps (~25w) for the Tricolour - I can understand the desire to save a little on Nav lights - but 2amps over a max 12hr period is just 24Amps ... as long as you have good batteries then is that really much of a dent to your power consumption?
 
I seemed to have got fixated on the masthead light as that is the one that has an example conformity at 5nm on the Aquasignal range. Since no company actually specifies the real distance, as opposed to the required distance, I had to find a light that used a 25W bulb but had the largest quoted minimum distance. That just turned out to be the masthead light.

Since these bulbs are inside light fittings any calculations of the actual light output will be reduced by the lens of the fitting.

Some thing I did find in relation to the Ouzo report:

[ QUOTE ]
COLREGS Annex 1 10(b) states that the horizontal intensity of navigation lights fitted to yachts could be expected to decrease if the vessel heels more than 5º. This might have reduced the distance at which Ouzo’s lights could be seen.


[/ QUOTE ]

The actual regulations state:

[ QUOTE ]
at least 50 per cent of the required minimum intensity is maintained from 25 degrees above to 25 degrees below the horizontal.


[/ QUOTE ]

So sailing is not as bad as MAIB makes out. Since the candela to distance relation is not a linear, the actual reduction in distance is not significant for a 25W bulb based light. So to me this point is just FUD and should never have been brought up as the real mistake was not seeing them at 1nm.

I did a quick survey and the LED explosion seems to be a myth. It looks like sense is prevailing.
 
LEDs are several times more efficient at turning electricity into light than an incandescent lamp and have a far longer life.

Quality and design which result in delivering that efficiency are of course vitally important but a burned out bulb or flat battery results in nil light output.

Hellamarine are part of a large company interested in maintaining their good name by supplying quality fittings to approved standards.

Including LED navigation lights
 
They are the good guys making true certified, sealed light fittings. Not bulbs to go in existing fittings, which is what the thread is about.

But they are only the minimum requirements of 3nm for the masthead version when Aquasignal sell a 25W light that is certified for 5nm. So no comparison. The others are 2nm.

Their marketing is a little suspect as they compare their lights to 60W of conventional bulbs (25W + 25W + 10W). However Aquasignal sell a port light that is certified for 2nm and ONLY has a 10W bulb!!

So again they are at least certified and legal, but not very honest about the lack of light output as they compare the lights by their published minimum output not the actual output.

"LEDs are several times more efficient at turning electricity into light" Not the whole story. The LED junction is more efficient but the realization of a complete light to work in a boat put lots of inefficiencies into the system. Unless designed correctly they have failure modes that are worse than Bulbs. The heat at the junction will severely degrade the life. Also white LEDs use a fluorescent principle that has much lower life than the LED junction.

If one of my bulbs fail it takes 2 minutes to swap and I'm back in business. (About 10 minutes for the steaming) If an LED fails then you send off for a complete new unit. In a close lightning situation LEDs would not survive the induced spikes.

If we redesigned the filament bulb so that it had the same amount of electronics as a LED and therefore the filament was run at its optimum temperature the light output would be far better. We could also design a fluorescent lamp replacement. Using backlight inverter technology from LCD screens. These are far more efficient than LEDs ever will be. So why has it not been done?

Simple reason is that safety should be simple and easy to mend.
 
I don't think that even the Hella lamps are IMO certified, they may meet the requirements of but not be certified by. I spoke to a Hella rep a few years ago and the problem with IMO certification is that with a filament lamp when it fails it fails totaly and is obviously so....with an LED /LCD array a partial failiure of several lamps will render the unit sub required output but this fact will not be known by the user as the lamp still seems to be working all ok.
 
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