LED Light Upgrade Project

It seems that converting your interior lights from incandescent to LED is becoming a popular project, and why not? Here, Rick and DAR of m/v September Dream show us theirs...

Now that the boat is back in the water, it's time to start taking care of some projects that I've wanted to do for a while now.  The first project is an upgrade of the interior lights to LED.

I'm finally getting around to completing the conversion of our interior lights from incadescent bulbs to LED bulbs.  Of course, this would have been a great project to have completed before we left for the trip, when saving amps would have been useful.  Oh well, better late than never... :-)

The first task was to source the replacement bulbs.  Primarily I just use google as my main research tool, but the Dr LED site (http://doctorled.com) is a great site with a lot of information on LED lamp replacement.

Most of the lighting (two double light fixtures in the salon, one double in the galley and two singles in the head) on the boat use a bulb with a model number of 1141 and a base of ba15s.  I found a number of different LED bulbs that would work as a replacement for the 1141 bulbs, but I chose the following from amazon;

http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B00DDOSNH2?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00

Part of the reason I chose these bulbs was the price ($5.00 per bulb is pretty good), but also because of the colour.

When you look at LED lighing, you'll see references to 'cool', 'warm', etc.  This refers to the colour of the light given off by the bulbs.  Here's a good link that illustrates this;

http://www.seesmartled.com/kb/choosing_color_temperature/

We previously had two LED bulbs in the salon, one in each light fixture, so we were able to run low current with our lights.  These bulbs were quite blue though ('cool' white colour according to the colour temperature) and we didn't find they did that good a job providing usable lighting.  I decided to change to 'warm' white colour for the replacements.

The new bulbs in one of the salon fixtures

A nice 'warm' white colour

After replacing all the bulbs it was time to do a current usage test to see just how much of a difference LED lights can make.

Everything turned off

Current usage of the incandescent bulb

Current usage of the LED bulb

As you can see, the LED bulbs are a great deal more efficient than the incandescent.

I still have a couple other lights to replace the bulbs in.  We have two reading lights in the stateroom, and a couple side lamps on either side of the couch in the salon.  They have a different bulb, with a screw in base known as an Edison E26 or E27.  I've yet to pick a replacement LED bulb for these yet, but now that I see the other LED bulbs I picked up I have a reference for what the colour looks like.

VHF upgrade project

Please welcome new contributors Rick & Dar aboard m/v September Dream!  I think you will enjoy following along with them as they cruise their Mainship 34 from Kemptville, Ontario to their intended destination of the Bahamas.

But for today, their first contribution to this site is the installation of a new VHF, complete with a remote speaker/mic/control:

The downtime from travelling while visiting Dar's sister has given me some time to get some work done on a couple projects.

The first project that I worked on was the completion of my VHF radio upgrade.

When we bought the boat it came with two VHF radios that were both more than a decade old.  Besides not having DSC (Digital Selective Calling) capabilities, the radio on the flybridge was starting to die.

I decided to replace both with a Standard Horizon GX-2150+, which not only is a modern DSC capable radio, but also has AIS (Automatic Identification System) receive capabilities.

Rather than go with two VHF radios again, I decided to go with a single radio, located at the lower helm, and use a RAM3 CMP-30 remote mic for the flybridge.  We still had an old VHF handheld for a backup, but I picked up a new Standard Horizon HX-290 as a primary backup, as well as a radio to use on the flybridge until I finished the RAM3 installation.

Another side benefit of going with the single radio is that it freed up one of the antenna mounts that can now be re-purposed, and will eventually be used as a mount point for an Amateur Radio HF antenna.

Installing the GX-2150+ at the lower helm was relatively easy.  It was pretty much a straight swap out for the radio that was at the lower helm, and I completed that the week before Canada Day.

To finish the project though meant that I had some cable runs to do between the flybridge and the lower helm.  First I had to run the interface cable between the radio and the remote mic.  Second I had to run an NMEA cable to interface between the chartplotter and the radio.  In order to do the AIS receive function, the radio needs to have GPS data.  As well, it also sends the AIS target information back to the chart plotter to be displayed as a data layer overlay.

Finally, I had to run a cable to connect the PA/Fog-horn, which was previously connected to the flybridge radio, to connect it to the new radio at the lower helm.

The first step was gaining access to the cabling space under the flybridge dash.  Imagine my surprise when I cracked the panel and found this;

Flybridge wasp nests

These are two of the *seven* wasp nests that I found.  Luckily, none of the nests were occupied by anything still living, but it was still a bit of a shock to find these.  I have no idea how old they were.  I do know that we never had any issues with wasps on the flybridge since we've owned the boat, so I have to assume they were from before we bought it.

After cleaning up the nests I got to work running the cables I needed.  Unfortunately this also involved a number of new holes being drilled.  This is something that no boat owner enjoys, but it was required.

I completed the cable runs on Wednesday and called it a day.  Today I worked on getting everything connected up.

The first connection I did was the remoting cable for the RAM3 mic.  I was lucky in that I could route the cable between the helms without having to cut the cable, and subsequently splice it back together.

Next I worked on the NMEA connection between the chartplotter and the radio.  One of the things I had wanted to do and did today was to wire the chartplotter in properly at the flybridge.  Previously it had a cable that had a 12v plug on the end, which you plugged in at a 12v socket on the flybridge or lower helm to use.  Because I had to wire in the NMEA connection I also wired the power in as well, and routed it through the flybridge dash.  I'm waiting for a second A-50D power/signal cable to come in at Marine Outfitters.  Once that comes in I'll do a similar setup at the lower helm.

I wired the NMEA connections on the A-50D cable to the NMEA cable that I ran yesterday.  At the lower helm I connected the NMEA cable to a 4 pin plug, and the radio side of the NMEA connection to a 4 pin socket.  I ran it through a plug rather than connecting directly so that if I needed to take the radio down for any reason there was no permanent connections that would have to be cut.

After checking all my connections I ran through the NMEA setup on both the chartplotter and the radio, both of which supported a 38400 data speed.  It was quite the thrill to hook everything up and see the GPS information on the radio.  I'll have to wait until we're back near Kingston next week to see how the AIS display works.

I was already quite impressed with the GX-2150+ radio, but I was also very pleased with how well the RAM3 remote mic works.  It has more than enough volume and all of the radio's functions can be accessed from the remote mic.

Standard Horizon GX-2150+

Standard Horizon RAM3 remote mic