Boats & Gear: Lighting

Light Keeper

New LED lights can last a decade or more.

By Michael Crowley, Correspondent

When the boat loses power and you need to see your way around, McDermott Light & Signal’s standby light provides up to 20 hours of light.

It’s night sometime during World War II and a wooden boat is rowing through the darkness. Every now and then a small light is dropped in the water next to a mine. The light has a range of a quarter mile, so those on shore don’t see it but when the Americans launch their attack they know where the mines are and “can come in fast,” said Vernon McDermott Sr., president, McDermott Light & Signal, Ridgewood, N.Y.

McDermott’s father built those lights, the first lights to come out of the nascent McDermott light business. They were soon followed by a light for submarines that had been damaged and couldn’t come off the bottom. The light with an attached telephone was sent out of the torpedo tube and up to the surface.

These days it’s all LEDs from McDermott Light. One of the company’s newer LED lights is a portable “Not Under Command Light.”

McDermott said that it “seems to be catching When a tug is, say, pushing a dredge and can’t maneuver, either a red-white-red light or two red lights warns others “to stay away from me. I can’t control what I’m doing,” said McDermott. Since the light is portable, simply attach it to a flange and plug it in.

McDermott notes that while the Coast Guard’s Rule 27 allows any form of light to be used, compared to an LED light, “other forms of light are so inefficient as far as its drain. An LED light can last 10 years. You don’t have to change it every 30 days.”

For about the past eight years, McDermott Light & Signal has been the only company to make LED standby lights for barges that haul concrete. When the barge is at the dock and guys are vacuuming out the concrete and the power shuts off, the LED lights stay on and will remain on for 20 hours. “The power goes out and they’ve got light.”

McDermott Light’s newest standby light is for a tugboat’s interior. “It’s for the hallways,” said McDermott and is currently being tested by the Coast Guard.

ORCA GREEN MARINE

Orca Green Marine's Q Series TriColor/ anchor light.

Orca Green Marine hasn’t been around as long as McDermott, only since 2002, but it had the first Coast Guard-approved LED navigation light in the world, said Megan Matthews, the company’s founder and CEO.

That tri-colored light was introduced in April 2004. It was quickly followed by an all-around LED anchor light whose first customers were Navy SEALS operating in the South Pacific.

On all of OGM’s LEDs, Matthews does the design work, the prototyping and personally builds the first 100 to 150 lights for each new light model. Beyond that, an ISO 9001 certified manufacturer in Texas had been solely responsible for building the LED lights.

But that just changed. The company announced in April that Weems & Plath in Annapolis, Md., will be responsible for manufacturing and distributing OGM navigation lights.

That’s happening at the same time OGM is introducing its Q Series LED lights. The Q Series, instead of being sealed with epoxy, has O-rings and gaskets that make it watertight. The housing is Type-3 anodized aluminum. “It will last decades rather than a couple of years,” noted Matthews.

Since the Q Series isn’t sealed closed with epoxy, they “are upgradable as technology continues to evolve,” said Matthews.

LED technology is evolving. LED lights, she said, are “getting smaller, brighter, cooler and much more efficient than even three to four years ago.” In the fall the Q Series lights will have the option to be upgraded from a 3-pin cable to a 5-pin cable. Then if the need arises a light can be turned from its normal function to an SOS signal. “If you need to hail the Coast Guard, you could have all OGM lights flashing SOS,” said Matthews. LEDs work well for that kind of signaling because,

when compared to other lights, they “can turn off and on very quickly. Imperceptible to the naked eye.”

IMTRA

Imtra’s CLite1 LED searchlight will be released to the U.S market in the fall. An optional Flir camera can be integrated into the light.

If it’s an LED searchlight you are looking for, Imtra Corp., New Bedford, Mass., may have what you need. The company branched out into LED exterior lights in 2016 by partnering with the Swedish company Luminell with the CLite2, a dual-headed searchlight.

This coming fall Imtra will introduce the single-head CLite1.

A benefit of LED searchlights compared to traditional searchlights is once they are turned on you have 100% illumination. There’s no warm up. Both the CLite2 and CLite1 can be networked into numerous control stations, and a control panel indicates the direction of the searchlight. You can select five preset surveillance locations, and the searchlight changes to each location after a certain period of time. Both searchlights can be matched up with a Flir camera for nighttime surveillance.

Imtra’s second venture into exterior LED lighting occurred in 2017 with the Dutch company DHR for the DHR40, DHR60 and DHR80 LED navigation lights with aluminum housings.

All three modes are Coast Guard certified. A key feature is that all parts of the three lights — driver, circuit board and lens — can be replaced onboard a vessel.