More light - Less Energy - Adios!

Conserving energy is important once Ardea goes off grid and becomes a self-sufficient, floating community. We currently have two 12 volt batteries that act as both our house bank (cabin lights, running lights, water pumps) and our starter battery (for the engine). The batteries are connected to a isolator switch, allowing us to select one battery at a time, essentially giving us two “battery banks.” In theory we should never have two dead batteries. In practice this isnt always the case and, from Connor's previous post, you know we have had two power-less nights. While we need to check the wiring and potentially buy new batteries we are also working on conserving energy via LED light bulbs.

Ardea was built in 1973, pre- LED. While incandescent bulbs provide a nice light for reading, they draw a large amount of power and provide a relatively low amount of light. For example, the overhead light in the cabin before we switched over to an LED version was a 20 watt bulb...

Connor bought new LEDs and a problem presented itself, we wanted to use the old light fixtures for the new bulbs and they didn't fit. Solution: make an adapter for the new LED bulbs that allowed us to screw them into the old fixture and more importantly use the light switches already in place.

Since we no longer needed our incandescent bulbs we decided to use the base of those bulbs as our adapter and modify the wiring to fit the LEDs.

Step 1: Break our old light bulbs:

Step 2: Solder in two new wires, one ground and one hot:

Step 3: Attach the bayonet style fixture to the new wires:

Step 4: Mix an epoxy with a high fill content to make the unit solid:

Step 5: A much brighter cabin!

Adios USA!