Reggie - the riding light

Reggie pricing

  • Cheap and cheerful with integrated battery £15

    Votes: 11 22.4%

  • Flexipower using your own batteries £25

    Votes: 23 46.9%

  • High performance with batteries supplied £50

    Votes: 5 10.2%

  • Room for a budget & hi performance model

    Votes: 10 20.4%
  • Total voters
    49
Storyline

Storyline

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11 Oct 2004
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Location
Liverpool - boat Ardfern
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I have been very touched by the posts of support to my embryonic plan to produce an automatic anchor light.

This is the start of the process and I promise not to deluge the forum with posts about it but I would really value your opinions on where to pitch it pricewise.

People who have bought cheap torches from China known how cheap they can be obtained for but I know from experience that distributing a Chinese made product here can see the costs soar.

So I would appreciate your views on these very approximate price points.

The poll presumes you would be interested in buying one (although not necessarily from me obviously).

Option one is a no frills light with built in battery and auto on/off at dusk/dawn. The light would have to be left in daylight for several hours to charge up enough for the night.

Option two is the same but includes the ability to put in rechargeable batteries and charge with solar or 12v cigarette plug or even put in non chargeable AA's. Auto on/off.

Option three is a high performance model with long range Kree bulbs, rechargeable batteries (supplied) and 12v charging plug. Auto on/off.

Option 4 is that there is room in the market for a budget & high performance model.

Any other suggestions gratefully received :)
 
My current anchor light (which I am very happy with) is a Bebi Owl with daylight sensor and the additional downward-facing lights underneath (I originally thought it might double up as cockpit illumination, which in fact it never has, but lighting up the foredeck makes the boat more visible so is still useful). However, Bebi have now been driven out of business by the Fijian government, so if it ever breaks one day then I'm going to need to replace it with something else.

I don't think I would go for a light with its own batteries. It's one more thing to ensure is charged and ready. Whereas my current light is spliced to the anchor ball, and has a cable that runs down the inside of the downhaul rope (I taped the cable to the end of the braided rope core and then pulled it out of the cover, leaving the braid cover and a new current-carrying core). So I can take the whole assembly out of a locker, clip the spinnaker halyard to the eye just above the ball, hoist it into position and then plug the lead (that emerges from the bottom of the downhaul) into a socket in the anchor well. The next morning I lower it, fold the ball flat, coil the downhaul, and chuck the whole lot in a locker. I would not want to plug it in to charge, nor leave it lying around on deck to charge in the sunlight (and a viable solar panel seems to imply quite a big light, mine is roughly 1-1/2" in each dimension). I also wouldn't want to have to buy batteries for it. I have abundant supplies of power in the boat's 12v system, I want to use that for lighting and not maintain a separate self-contained system.

Price wise, I will often pay for quality if it does exactly what I need, but I'm not scared of low-priced Chinese stuff on eBay either.

Obviously other people's needs might vary - I'm just giving mine to help map out the market.

Pete
 
Thanks Pete, that sounds similar to the system that we inherited with the boat i.e. a wired solution and which replaced (a bit sadly) our Nescafe jar which served us well for many years. The difference is that your wire is a lot more elegant than our wandering lead. The two factories I have been talking to both make those cheap garden lights, the kind you see in the DIY sheds. They obviously want to steer me in that direction which is why I have asked a HK based design agency to come up with some other ideas.

I think the fundamental thing is whether people want a wired or wireless system.

Vyv, yours sounds wireless and you say you switch it on at the start of the season and off at the end. Does that mean that you have it permanently mounted somewhere or do you rig it at night ?

As regards Storyline, we hang ours from the boom but I know the correct position is above the foredeck. I am not sure how many people have power sockets there whereas in the cockpit there is either likely to be a socket or if not it is a short run into the cabin where there will be one.

On reflection, maybe the fundamental question I should have asked before getting into the minutiae of pricing is whether a wired or wireless solution is what people want.

Any other feedback folks ?
 
Now here is an idea. How about a combined anchor ball and light? My existing anchor light plugs into the ship's 12 volt batteries and that would be the best method for me.
 
Storyline said:
Vyv, yours sounds wireless and you say you switch it on at the start of the season and off at the end. Does that mean that you have it permanently mounted somewhere or do you rig it at night ?
Click to expand...

He posted a picture of it in the other thread and it looks like it's mounted on the top of a (rusty :) ) steel pole. So I assume the pole is fixed to the stern rail and the light is a permanent fixture.

Pete
 
mainsail1 said:
Now here is an idea. How about a combined anchor ball and light? My existing anchor light plugs into the ship's 12 volt batteries and that would be the best method for me.
Click to expand...
It did occur to me to have some way of combining them separately but now you mention it, how about an incandescent anchor ball !
(probably look like a very low full moon :))
Tongue in cheek as the anchor ball has to be a dark shape iirc
 
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Ha Ha

Seriously though I kind of thought the light could be fixed to the top or bottom of the ball - permanently.

If the light battery lasted a season, which I guess would be feasible with LEDs, maybe a 12 volt supply could be dispensed with.
 
My experience of the garden lights with PV panels is that they are total carp. Looking at how they work, it is clear that the generation, storage and power use figures are not balanced so the built in battery gets 100% discharged repeatedly and fails. Making one that did work would no doubt be possible but I'd need to be convinced by the figures before buying one. Also the ones I have seen use a Joule Thief circuit so that the single 1.2v battery will run the 3.2v LED, this give a spikey supply which wouldn't be great for LED life.
Without over thinking it at this point, I'd go for something that took 4 AAs since a little regulation allows it to run White LEDs from either alkalines or NiMh cells. Also I'd want the ability to hard wire it to the boats system on a long lead ideally.
Cree LEDs are not particularly premium in this day and age so I would want those as a matter of course.
Another thing that crosses my mind though, is that if a design was produced and manufacture financed by a crowd funded project, the product might well end up being manufactured in larger numbers than required and sold off by someone else.
If this is not really a commercial project and had projected manufacturing batches for sales in the high hundreds, I'd do it in the Uk, at least that has been my experience.
That's enough for tonight anyway
Cheers
Rum Run
 
My anchor light is attached on top of the anchor ball, and wired to a Dri-plug inside the anchor locker.
It's a led cluster inside a 360° clear plastic signal like those for <7m boats.
The bulb light strikes the deck from time to time, or the light spreads over the mast front or furled genoa, which gives some flickering appearance and make the boat most visible.

I would like:
1. a more powerful led light, mine is visible from very far away but more is better to identify your boat in crowded anchorages
2. a non-spinning anchor ball, without having to lock it with a web of strings all around. My spinning anchor ball has already broken the electrical wire once, through twisting and counter-twisting.
Photosensitive switch would be a plus, but not really needed. Operated by its own batteries no-no.

Oh, and if you need a representative on the continent... :)
 
prv said:
He posted a picture of it in the other thread and it looks like it's mounted on the top of a (rusty :) ) steel pole. So I assume the pole is fixed to the stern rail and the light is a permanent fixture.

Pete
Click to expand...

Yes, it is mounted permanently on one of the arch rails that support my solar panels . It operates throughout the summer months, wherever we are. There is a switch to turn it off but the hassle involved in climbing up there for a night in port is not worth the effort. The pole is supposedly stainless steel but I have to assume it is a particularly poor grade!

I would have attached the pic again but the ybw attachment facility defeats me again. How do you drag an attachment to another area with a touch sensitive screen?
 
I'd also prefer something thats powered from the boat so I've not voted. The just failed lamp has a 10m lead back from the foredeck back to a socket in the cockpit, it was a Bebi with very good visibilty
 
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GHA said:
What leds are you looking at using?
I built one myself a while ago and after a lot of time spent researching found these:

http://uk.mouser.com/Search/Product...tualkey57280000virtualkey941-C503DWANCBBDB152

16 mounted in a plastic plumbing pipe end cap.

Very bright! Even at 0.1A.
Click to expand...

+1
I made one up with three small multi- SMD/LED devices in a clear lamp casing- It hardly uses any power, but is VERY bright. It plugs into a deck socket under the canopy, and sits about 8 feet off deck level- at the flag halyard cleat on a stay. I can comfortably say it's visible for several miles, as we've used it to find the boat at night...
They are a blue white rather than "warm white". Our boat was not fitted with a masthead anchor light.
 
Must take a picture of my set up this weekend. If you see a boat on the pontoon at Bembridge with the ball and riding light up come and say hello.

-----Vyv I always open the attachment in a seperate tab right click the picture and choose "Copy Image Location" the go back to the forum, open the "Insert Image" select the "From URL" tab right click the URL box and paste in the address. But if you can't right-click on the touchscreen, or it's not running Windows, that's not going to help.
 
Not voted as my anchor light is on masthead, some thoughts though:

If the device could have a removable base that allowed the light to shine downwards as well as horizontally, I would be interested for hanging in the cockpit in the evening.

Anything other than lithium batteries are a dead loss IMO. Need to be protected type, like this: http://amzn.to/1inSyWq

I suggest a loop on the base so it can be steadied if hung below the anchor ball.
 
There is considerable support for a wired version (which is what we use now) but the problem with that is knowing how much wire to include. As said before, we, and I have seen others do this, hang the light in the cockpit whereas it should be in the fore triangle. Maybe the answer would be not to include any wire but just a waterproof plug. If this was the case the solar panel would be a bit superfluous and also the batteries.

Maybe the answer is to have two models, wired & wireless, both with auto on/off and high power LED's (two miles).

Any thoughts ?
 
Daydream believer said:
Bought a couple of LEDs, from Searolfe, for cabin lighting & whenever I turn one on the hand held VHF throws a fit if it is within 15 feet of the things
Click to expand...

I wrote about this issue back in January 2012 and it seems little has been done to address it since then:
http://www.saltyjohntheblog.com/2012/01/vhf-radio-interference-from-leds.html

An LED anchor light of the type discussed here, however, is less of a problem because it is usually deployed well away from the vhf antenna.
 
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