LED lighting strips

[RDW]

My wife is getting a led lighting strip put in under her cabinets. It is a strip about 1/3 inch wide with a sticky back and a small LED about every inch or so. There are places to cut it every 2-3 inches where there are metal tabs that you would put some sort of connector to join with your 12 volt electrical system. Seems like an easy way to get light in all kinds of places in a boat. On the real was "EIAJ-RRM12B AND ZZH002"
Any body know more? Any body used them on a boat?
rdw

[colemj]

We use these in many places on the boat. They even make waterproof ones that we have in the cockpit. To cut to size, you can either solder wires to those tabs or buy pigtail connectors that clamp onto them.

Mark

[GordMay]

➥ ZHUOYAO Waterproof 72W 5400lm 300 x SMD 5050 LED RGB Decoration Light Strip - (DC 12V / 5M) - Free Shipping - DealExtreme

[Ribman]

I did something similar in the cabin replacing all of the old or missing incandescent fixtures with adhesive backed LEDs and have been happy with the results.


I mounted some 1" aluminum strips in place and stuck the LEDs to them to act as heat sinks and to give a more uniform surface for the adhesive. You might think this is overkill.
To control the lights I purchased digital dimmers from Ebay 4 Pcs Lot LED Light Dimmer 12 24 Volt DC Boat Marine Chart Accent Lighting | eBay. They were so cheap that I bought extras for spares and have been glad that I did. In two years I have not had any failures during use. I did however manage to ruin a few by shorting the outputs through carelessness while they were hot.

[msponer]

Here's a short video of what they look like on our boat, which has a long strip across the ceiling in the pilothouse and salon/galley. We are very happy, at full power they yield a very bright and even, shadowless light. Both strips together eat ~7 amps. We usually dim them to about 3/4 of their maximum.

The VHB tape on their back did not adhere well to our formica headliner. We had to improvise little plastic clips to hold it up, and they sag down from the ceiling between the clips. 3M makes a primer for this tape that may have helped, but I think we should have instead put them on aluminum.

We also got the RGB kind since it's more fun. Our kids like the disco party color cycling mode. In red mode, we can dim them way down and feel like we are in a submarine while drawing about 0.1 amps. In white mode they flicker when all the way dimmed, so we don't go that low with them.

[colemj]

We have colored ones in our cockpit and they are OK in that use. Inside the boat, we use the warm white ones. These are very close in color to halogen lights - warm and bright.

The colored ones have 3 separate red, green and blue leds, and they produce other colors by mixing these proportionally. White is produced by lighting all of them. The white color thus produced is not very pleasant - at best resembling a fluorescent light.

Also, these colored ones come in two varieties - one type has repeating units of R, G, B in separate LED's along the strip, while the other type has three smaller RGB LED's in each "bulb".

The first type gives very poor white light, and its other color reproduction is also bad, but it excels at the disco stuff. The second type is much better white and color, but not as good at the disco.

Mark

[denverd0n]

LED strips are great for under-cabinet lighting. We use them on the boat. We use them in the kitchen at home. I even have some in my garage workshop at home.

[pickpaul]

IKEA has a good selection well priced if you have one in the area fyi

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Cruisers Sailing Forum mobile app