In regard to using an alternative lamp to replace the OEM reading lamps used in the cabin of a REVENGE, it happened that yesterday I was on the boat working on a different project, I had a lot of tools with me, and the weather was quite pleasant for working outdoors. That project took much longer than I anticipated, and by the time it was finished it was too late in the day to go boating--which had been part of the plan and particularly due to the nice weather. Instead, I abandoned the boating and decided I would install a new reading lamp that had been sitting on a shelf in the basement for about two years, just waiting for the opportunity to be put to use.
- Fig. 6. An LED reading lamp installed in the same location as the original reading lamp in the cabin of a c.1990 REVENGE 22 W-T boat. To give some scale, the circular lamp base is 65-mm or about 2.6-inches.
- brassReadingLampLED.jpg (76.17 KiB) Viewed 139 times
The replacement lamp was an LED fixture with a brass housing, sold by a firm named VICTORY and their
model AA00922LED, Light, Bullet, Brass, LED, 12-Volt model, and clearly marked "Made in China." The company VICTORY appears to be a Vancouver, British Columbia marine hardware specialized retailer. As part of the packaging there was an A4 sheet of printed specifications, with a detailed drawing of the lamp, a graph of the lumen output variation with time to 1,000-hours of operation, and notations of certification approvals for CE and RoHS.
The VICTORY website lists this particular lamp as no longer available but having been selling selling at CA-$111.50 or about US-$81. That seems quite expensive to me, and Amazon has some much less expensive alternatives. However, I happened to have two of these on hand, and I had acquired them at a very much more attractive price; they were a gift.
The first step in the project was to remove the lamp from its retail packaging, which was a printed cardboard backing with the lamp sealed onto it with extremely strong and durable vacuum wrapped plastic. This turned out to be the hardest part of the installation, and perhaps the most dangerous, as the plastic wrap was extremely insistent on not giving up its very strong hold on the product wrapped inside, and I was fearful I might bend the brass while trying to pry it free or cut myself trying to sever the plastic wrap.
Step two was to remove the OEM lamp from the cabin bulkhead. In typical Boston Whaler fashion, the original lamp was very well fastened to the fiberglass bulkhead by two hefty No. 10-32 flat head stainless steel Phillips drive machine screws, a large 1-inch fender washer, and a 3/8-inch elastic stop nut. These machine screws were substantially longer than needed, so unthreading the elastic stop nut on two inches of extra 32-TPI thread required putting my small Ryobi power screwdriver to use to produce the required 64-revolutions. Also, the extra thread length came in very handy for mounting the LED lamp, as the thickness of its base was greater than on the OEM lamp base.
The new lamp came with some stainless steel flat-head No. 6 self-tapping screws for mounting, probably sufficient for fastening into wood, but marginal for thin fiberglass. I decided to re-use the larger No. 10 Boston Whaler machine screws. This necessitated enlarging the two recessed mounting holes in the brass base section of the new lamp, which fortunately were already designed for flat head fasteners. As for the mounting to the cabin bulkhead, I was able to use two of the existing holes, the large center one for the electrical conductors and one hole of the two mounting screw holes. I had to make one extra 3/16-inch diameter hole (to accommodate the No. 10 machine screw), but I noted that if I decided to return to the OEM lamp the new hole would be covered by the large mounting base of the original lamp. I also had to rotate the lamp mounting pillar in order to change to a vertical orientation of the mounting fasteners and to get switch on the berth side of the lamp to make it easier to access.
The electrical part of the installation was straightforward. The boat electrical circuit for the lamp is provided on a two-conductor flat cable ("zip cord') with GRAY and BLACK markings fed by a fused circuit at the helm. Typically GRAY is a tachometer signal or a navigation lamp, but in this case the gray-black zip cord wire was also used for cabin interior lamps, with gray the positive circuit conductor to the lamp ON-OFF switch and black the unswitched negative circuit conductor. Putting the power disconnect in the positive circuit is very important on a boat, as this reduces the chance for any galvanic corrosion to occur when the associated device when switch is not closed. Because the lamp supply circuit is always hot--the only control switch is part of the lamp fixture--I set the main battery power switch to OFF so I would not have any live wires when cutting them and reconnecting them.
The electrical connection to the OEM lamp was concealed under the lamp base, but with the new lamp its conductors were generously long, and I moved the connection to behind the bulkhead. The old connection to the power wiring was with insulated butt-splice connectors, but for the new installation I just used appropriately-small twist-on blue wire nuts, which handle conductors from AWG-22 to AWG-14. The lamp wiring was a tinned solid conductor, and the lamp circuit was tinned stranded conductor, and both appeared to about 16-AWG.
The old lamp was rated 18-Watts incandescent at 12-Volts or 1.5-Amperes; the LED is rated 0.5-Watts at 12-Volts, or 0.042-Amperes. That will be a considerable reduction in battery energy--assuming they both produce the same amount of light. The LED fixture is rated at 15 Lumen. An 1141 incandescent is rated at 260 lumens. Hmm, this new "reading" lamp may not be quite as bright as expected. This remains to be tested. I will have to get out to the boat at night and compare the two.