Switch to LEDs for a More Enjoyable and Affordable Boating Season

For most people, the months of February and March mean little more than continued chilly days and rainy weather. For boaters however, these months herald the coming of boating season and signal that it’s time to finish up those offseason repairs and begin making preparations for setting the hull in water again. While most folks will do whatever they can to avoid working outside during these still cold months of winter, boaters on the other hand are quite busy, spending hours out in the driveway or in the garage preparing their boats for the coming spring and summer months.

The months preceding spring and the beginning of boating season are an ideal time to begin assessing your boat’s current condition and addressing any last minute repairs or upgrades that you may have put off for later in favor of making major repairs. While the pressure is off, it’s a great time to consider upgrades to your electrical systems and lighting, and if there is one area on every boat that can use a little attention, it’s lighting. There are few accessories on a boat that take a beating every season the way lighting does, and few are the boaters who haven’t run into one issue or another every season because of power hungry lighting and limited electrical power.

For boater who frequent salt and brackish waters, corrosion is the main enemy they must always be on guard against. Nothing will make such short work of unprotected metal, exposed wiring, switches and bulb sockets the way a little bit of exposure to salt water can. Even if your boat rarely sees salt water use and is mainly confined to fresh water, lighting systems are still exposed to wetness and harsh weather conditions that can create shorts in connections and destroy plastic lenses in as little as one season. As most boaters know, it is far from unusual to replace several lamps and fixtures as often as every season, and most boaters have simply accepted this as a matter of course.

The months before boating season really gets underway are an ideal time to get a handle on your boats’ lighting issues once and for all. Particularly now with so many new lighting options available, there is little reason to relegate yourself to another season of rationing power supplies and changing bulbs here and there on every other outing. New lighting technologies have matured in the last several years, and offer a slew of benefits that make upgrading no longer a question of why bother, but why not? You can greatly reduce power use, improve visibility on your boat as well as your boats’ visibility to others, and make your lighting almost impervious to the effects of the marine environment, simply by upgrading to LEDs. As if these benefits weren’t enough, imagine not changing a light bulb again for the next five to ten years, especially your anchor and mast lights. Yes, you read that right; no more climbing a twenty five or thirty foot mast to change out an anchor light for the next decade! Sounds pretty good doesn’t it?

LEDs offer all these benefits and more, simply by virtue of their unique design and construction. LEDs have no filaments, and instead are built more like a transistor or microchip. Instead of heating a wire, electricity passes through the semi-conduction material that makes up the heart of the LED, and through a process called electroluminescence, causes the material to radiate energy in the form of photons, more simply known as light. This process is highly efficient, allowing LEDs to convert up to ninety percent of the energy fed into them into light, whereas a simple incandescent light bulb only converts about ten percent. This process also produces a lot less heat, which means with LEDs there will be no more buns if you accidently touch a switched on light fixture.

Since LEDs are solid state in design, they are also a whole lot more durable than light bulbs. There’s no glass used in their construction, no thin wire filament, and they are so small and compact, that dozens can be mounted within sealed enclosures and still result in a light fixture that takes up no more space, if not less, than a typical halogen spreader light. Where LEDs really shine for boaters though is their efficiency. Since LEDs convert so much more of their consumed electrical energy into light, it takes less energy to produce the same amount of light as a comparable incandescent bulb. For example, a 20 watt LED spreader light can produce the same amount of light as a 60 watt halogen spreader light, while drawing only a quarter as many amps as well. Even better, since LEDs are highly directional, more of the light they produce goes where you want it to, rather than being radiated off in random directions.

There are plenty of stories now about tests and everyday boaters that have realized power consumption reductions of fifty percent or more just by switching entire old incandescent lighting systems with LEDs. Such results are entirely within the ability of the average boater to realize, and reaching or surpassing those results depends more upon how far one is willing to go with an upgrade than anything else. As if this were not enough, most LED fixtures designed for boats operate natively with 12 or 24 VDC power, making them a natural fit for boats where such voltages are the norm. For the owner of a modest sized watercraft, switching to LEDs is often an entirely plug and play affair as it were.

With fuel prices being what they are, and the cost of maintaining luxuries like boats continually increasing, switching to LEDs only makes sense. They lower fuel bills, reduce maintenance costs, significantly reduce lamp replacement costs, offer excellent reliability, and can improve overall lighting quality in the bargain. With so much to gain, the higher initial cost of switching to LEDs can easily be offset by savings in other areas, and what boater wouldn’t like to look forward to a new boating season knowing that not only will it be more enjoyable, but it’ll cost less as well?