I used to make the original FirstStar anchor lights using 3mm lamp style (look kinda like little light bulbs) leds,in fact these were the first white light leds available in the world, but now I no longer use those type of leds. Why? Because the lamp style makes less light per watt than newer leds.
Luxeon leds (and in general other leds that look like those ones) get much hotter because they are making much more light per single led, but they are still far more efficient than older type leds. They just concentrate their heat in one small spot, but overall it will be less heat. Also Luxeon leds have a much wider beam than the lamp style so make a light that can be seen better in rolley anchorages or when you are very close. And because the beam is spread very evenly there won't be bright and dim areas like you will get when you use many smaller leds with narrower beams. On another note, just looking at how much current an led light draws is not enough to compare for efficiency because what you need to know is how much power the device uses, not how much current. Current will change in some designs as voltage changes but not in others, OGM for instance has a switch mode supply and the current draw will decrease when the voltage rises, but many designs will draw the same current as the voltage rises which means their average power use is much greater across the voltage range. And there is more than just heat and efficiency to consider when you look at other nav lights, a big issue is how well the light seperates the color sectors, this is important so that the colors do not overlap and mix producing dangerous confusion, and I have in fact seen lights for sale that do have color sector overlap. Surge and transient protection are important also if you do not want the light to fail much sooner than expected, most lights have very little built in protection. For more info see the full tech pages at www.firststarled.com -Ken _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://www.liveaboardnow.org/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardnow.org/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
