Replacing Navigation Lights With LEDs
Marine Navigation Lights
Within the old days, the navigation lights on your own boat were little incandescent bulbs housed inside a small fixture with colored lenses. Simple and small as they were, somehow they always appeared to have a way of causing problems wild of proportion for their size. Oftentimes it seemed as though the mere act of placing boat on the water in the dark would cause them to blow out. A few nighttime outings or even a single season useful could lead to dead lights, corroded sockets, and fogged up lenses. Worse, most old style navigation lights were hardly what you could call user serviceable. Once a fixture corroded, there was little recourse besides replacing the whole lot if you wanted to have more than a few weeks of use out of it again.
Marine Navigation Lights
Nowadays, however, incandescent lights are becoming something of the antique notion to be remembered with a strange combination of dread and nostalgia. The periods of trying to remove rusted fixtures from mounts, clean corroded sockets and wiring, and clean up foggy colored lenses are rapidly receding into history as new navigation lighting technology involves the fore. The days are gone of putting your boat in water only to have your lights fail in the first sign of an oncoming yacht or rainstorm. Of course, we are talking about the creation of the LED into the marine navigation lighting niche'.
The light emitting diode, or "LED" for brief, has largely obliterated the difficulties usually associated with navigation lighting. Powerful, efficient, compact, highly durable and very long lived; incandescent navigation lights never stood a chance once the LED was introduced. Where it was once pretty much standard practice to periodically inspect, clean and replace your lights repeatedly during the boating season, LEDs are making it possible to go a complete season with nothing more than an occasional inspection to make sure everything is still operating not surprisingly. In most cases, an LED lighting won't even break for 5 years or maybe more.
LEDs are nothing like an incandescent light bulb. They have no glass bulb, there is no filament, and there is very little heat produced. The reason being LEDs produce light in the wholly different manner. As opposed to heat a filament like an incandescent bulb to produce light, that is by the way extremely inefficient, LEDs produce light via a process called electroluminescence. Rather than go into a long and slow technical explanation, it's enough to merely say that electrical power is fed via a small piece of semi-conducting material which then emits light energy. This technique is extremely efficient, produces little heat, and is also basically solid produced in operation, meaning there isn't any parts to simply melt away or wear out in a short period of time. At the most basic, an LED is a diode, just like you'd find in a radio or your computer. They're efficient, compact, and robust light sources that will operate for several years without fail.
The little size, long life and cool operation of the LED lends itself very well to boat lighting. Given that they can operate for quite some time, run cool, and so are very small in size, LEDs may be fully sealed or potted inside a housing, making them impervious to water and air and therefore extremely resistant to corrosion. Additionally, the solid state style of an LED navigation light causes it to be extremely durable. An LED equipped navigation light can withstand abuse and types of conditions that would normally make short work of your incandescent navigation light. Vibrations, pounding waves, rain squalls, and even minor impacts with docks will be shrugged off by quality made Led lamps. About the best that should be expected from an incandescent nav light under those conditions is surely an expectation of servicing and replacement regularly.
Another of the reasons why LEDs are proving very popular as lights is the ability to produce color specific light. Unlike incandescent bulbs which normally require a colored lens to produce the red, blue, and green colors necessary for navigation lighting, LEDs can produce these colors naturally. Which means that clear lenses can be used, resulting in a brighter navigation light without the colored lens that will reduce the fixtures overall light output. While LED navigation lighting is certainly available with colored lenses for your purists out there, they just aren't necessary and actually reduce overall effectiveness.
Where LED lights really shine though is within light output and electrical efficiency. A typical incandescent bulb produces about 17 light lumens per watt at the best. Most of the electrical energy fed for the bulb is radiated as heat, producing a very inefficient and wasteful source of light. LEDs, on the other hand, produce anywhere from 60 to 100 lumens per watt. Very little energy fed in to the LED is radiated as heat, resulting in a very efficient light source that can produce a lot more light than an incandescent with all the far less electrical power. Thinking about the importance of navigation lighting and also the need to conserve power on a boat, this is an extremely attractive benefit. You should use less power, yet produce a much stronger nav light signal, giving you better visibility to other boats while reducing power consumption simultaneously. On smaller boats, you can run a basic set of navigation lights for hours and still not deplete your batteries. Increased safety and increased efficiency, all from your simply change in light sources!
Switching to LED lights is easy too. With less effort than it takes to remove, clean and repair a standard incandescent nav light, it is possible to install an LED unit in its place. Companies like Magnalight offer LED navigation lights that need little more than screwing the machine into place and linking the wires in order to complete an installation. With a couple hours of effort, it is possible to switch out all your navigation lights with LED units and reap several years' valuation on almost maintenance free operation. It is no surprise then that LEDs are quickly making the incandescent navigation lights something of the past.