Seeing the Light, and for Little Money

A couple of things that make us grouchy is poor interior lighting on sailboats and pissing away battery power. We think we’ve found a great solution that might work for your boat, too.

We’d been really happy with the interior lighting on Profligate, which years ago we changed from fluorescent and incandescent to a combination of LunaSea CFL general area tube lights and LED bulb replacements for the reading lights. These lights have been great, and they don’t use much juice.

The only exception has been to the lighting in the periphery of the main salon. There hasn’t been any. As a result, the edges of the salon have always been dark, making it seem smaller than it really is, and preventing us from being able to recognize people on the other side. That’s not right, so we decided to try some 12-volt LED strip lights as sold through Amazon.

We didn’t have much to lose, as each five-meter (15-ft) strip only cost about $13. Because we wanted different amounts of light for different activities — bright for preparing food, dim for seducing someone — we also shelled out $8 for a dimmer for each strip.

Installation of the strips was so simple that a publisher could do it. The strips have 3M adhesive on the back, so we just taped them to the fiberglass overhead. We put one strip along the sides of the salon, and one across the front. They are pretty inconspicuous, but we also bought some thin wood strips to act as valances. One of these days we’ll get around to putting them up.

We were totally blown away by the way the new lights transformed the interior of the salon. At full illumination, just one of the three strips provides sufficient ambient light for the entire salon. If we crank all three of them up, it’s like being on stage, the only downside being that guests start prancing around playing air guitar. We can dim the lights to any level of illumination we desire.

Because they are LEDs, the strips take very little power, and even less when they are dimmed. Supposedly they are good for 30,000 hours. But at those prices, whose counting?

Two things: Make sure you get the 2700 Kelvin strips, or you’ll get the cold blue or bright white lighting that destroys the ambience of everyplace but a DMV office. The 2700K ones we got are very similar to warm incandescent light. Secondly, while you can snip the strips to any length you want, they don’t do corners or curves well.

We like the lights so much that we’re taking a set of them, as well as dimmers, to install on ‘ti Profligate in the Caribbean. She had incandescent salon lights that never properly did the job and drained the batteries. We replaced them with LED bulbs thinking that was the solution. It wasn’t, as the bulbs weren’t bright enough and were too directional. We’ve bought an outdoor version of the LED strips to use to illuminate the cockpit for al fresco dining. We can’t wait to hook them up!