Marine Navigation Lights
Within the old days, the navigation lights in your boat were little incandescent bulbs housed inside a small fixture with colored lenses. Basic and small as they were, somehow they always appeared to have a way of causing problems crazy of proportion with their size. Oftentimes it seemed as if the mere act of putting a boat on the water in the dark would cause them to fly out. A few nighttime outings or perhaps a single season of usage could lead to dead lights, corroded sockets, and fogged up lenses. Worse, most old-style navigation lights were hardly what you might call user serviceable. When a fixture corroded, there was little recourse besides replacing everything if you wanted to get more than a few weeks of use out of it again.
Today, however, incandescent lights are becoming something of the antique notion to become 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 concerns the fore. Gone are the days of putting your boat in water only to have your lights fail at the first sign of an oncoming yacht or rainstorm. Of course, we are talking about the development of the LED into the marine navigation lighting niche’.
The lighting emitting diode, or “LED” for brief, has largely obliterated the issues 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, and also replace your lights repeatedly during the boating season, LEDs make it possible to go a whole season with nothing more than an occasional inspection to make certain everything is still operating needlessly to say. In most cases, an LED lighting won’t even degrade for 5 years or more.
LEDs are nothing such as an incandescent light bulb. They have no glass bulb, there isn’t any filament, and there is very little heat produced. This is because LEDs produce light in a wholly different manner. As opposed to heat a filament as an incandescent bulb to produce light, which can be by the way extremely inefficient, LEDs produce light through a process called electroluminescence. Rather than go into a long and drawn out technical explanation, it’s enough to merely say that electrical power is fed via a small piece of semi-conducting material which emits light energy. This technique is extremely efficient, produces little heat, and is basically solid stated in operation, meaning there isn’t any parts to simply burn off or wear out in the short period of time. At the most elementary, an LED is a diode, just like you’d discover in a radio or your computer. They’re efficient, compact, and powerful light sources that may 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 a while, run cool, and are very small in size, LEDs may be fully sealed or potted within a housing, making them impervious to water and air and thus 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 conditions that would normally make short work of an incandescent navigation light. Vibrations, pounding waves, rain squalls, and even minor impacts with docks will probably be shrugged off by quality made Leds. About the best that can be expected from an incandescent nav light under those conditions is an expectation of servicing and replacement on a regular basis.
Another of the reasons why LEDs are proving very popular as lights is 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 establish these colors naturally. Which means that clear lenses can be used, resulting in a brighter navigation light minus the colored lens that can 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 lamps really shine though is within light output and electrical efficiency. An average incandescent bulb produces about 17 light lumens per watt at best. Most of the electrical energy fed towards the bulb is radiated as heat, resulting in 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 into the LED is radiated as heat, producing a very efficient light source that will produce a lot more light than an incandescent while using far less electrical power. Taking into consideration the importance of navigation lighting and 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 concurrently. On smaller boats, you might run a basic pair of navigation lights all night 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 of computer takes to remove, neat and repair a standard incandescent nav light, you are able to install an LED unit in its place. Companies like Magnalight offer LED navigation lights that require little more than screwing the machine into place and linking the wires in order to complete an installation. With a couple hours of effort, you are able to switch out all your navigation lights with LED units and reap several years’ worth of almost maintenance free operation. It’s no wonder then that LEDs are quickly making the incandescent navigation lights a thing of the past.
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