Navlight LED- Marinebeam or?

[Ex-Calif]

Quick one.

So I read the material about color matching the LED for the lens color to get the right color on the water.

I am replacing incandescent festoon with LED. Marinebeam loves their LEDs at $25 per. 4 bulbs, anchor, stern, masthead and combo nav - Kaching!

So is there a cheaper path - I mean a pack of 4 festoon LEDs goes on Amazon for $6.

Those are probably the wrong color but are there cheaper options?

[a64pilot]

All kinds of issues with cheaper LED's sometimes. I put a bunch of them in my truck marker lights, 6 months later most have quit working.
I have a bunch (12) bayonet, single contact ones that I was going to put in my salon, turns out they are reverse polarity?

I ordered Marine Beam ones yesterday, yep awfully expensive, right at $200 for 14 of them, but supposedly they will work right with no RFI etc.

[Dockhead]

I admit that I have retrofitted LED Bay15D units in two of my nav lights -- steaming light and stern light. Both white. This is not certified and not really recommended, but I didn't see the harm since these lights (unlike sidelight, tricolor, etc.) don't have really critical cutoff angles and there are no color issues.

I would really suggest that you try to spring for some real LED nav lights. At least for sidelights and tricolor. For a smaller boat like yours, and assuming you are 12v rather than 24v, there are excellent units from Aqua Signal that are very inexpensive.

As others above said, avoid like the plague the el-cheapo LED bulb units. Nav lights are the last place in the world you want to have problems for the sake of saving a few dollars. I use the Imtra bulb units in my white nav lights, and they are fine, but next winter I will probably also change these to real LED nav lights, which have all the electrics potted in and really impervious to water. I like the Aqua Signal ones, which are reasonable in price, apparently reliable, and according to tests have the best optics.