Marine LED Lighting

We design, manufacture and install custrom built LED lighting for local charter boats.

Tasked with designing a lighting solution for a customer new boat, I realized that it was nearly impossible to source finished LED lamps with these requirements:

1. Efficiency

Solar and battery powered boats electric systems and installations with more than hundred lights don’t mix well unless they are designed with efficiency in mind.

Our lamps use highly efficient external drivers instead of series resistors as in led strips for example.. For equivalent LED brigtness this reduces power consumption between 20% and 30% .

2. Minimal heating

Due to external driver circuits, only heat emited by LED chips has to be dissipated. This is achieved by mounting the lights to an oversized aluminium heat sink. While we can afford this with a small scale home manufacturing, most mass produced lamps use only their casing to dissipate heat due to production cost savings.

Our lamps operate at around 38 degrees Celsius, which brings as to:

3. Durability

For LEDs heat is the enemy number one. For longest lifespan it is recommended the temperatures don’t exceed 50C and the current don’t exceed 50-60% of maximum nominal current.

Because we not only are installing LED lights, but also maintain existing installations, special attention is dedicated to quality workmanship and durable design.

Our LEDs use 600mA HPL chips from Epistar or Bridgelux manufactures. They also operate at 50% power (300mA) to make them last for years. Can’t realy say how many, but our first project of this kind is three years old, and a single lamp has yet to fail.

4. Water resistance

After mounting LED chips all solder joints and wire connections are potted with marine grade epoxy resin. This means they will happily work submerged in sea water.

5. Good looks

As our customer’s boats are wood construction, using wood for ceiling lamp covers was an appropriate and welcomed solution.

6. Affordable pricing

Due to Indonesian import tarifs, imported “yacht style” marine lights are insanely expensive. Multiplied by 100 units installed on average livaboard, cost could easily reach many thousand US dollars.

If this is out of your budget, then alternative solutions are eighter:

• installing ugly lamps used on large vessels, or
• installing house style lamps, which are too dim, corrode and burn out fast, or

Contact us and we might be able to find optimum solution.