LED Lighting

Hi Bpfisterer -- I too wanted the LED "look". What I did like Tonka was go to Superbrightleds and ordered all of my interior bulbs. The interior I did in Blue and the bilge I did in White -- figured it would be easier to see something in the bilge at night -- turned out I was right.... Very easy swap. However, after I got this done I found out that Autozone has almost the same leds for a few dollars less.

Then I decided to swap out our plastic cup holders for stainless with blue led's. That's where it got a little interesting. What I did was first look under the control panel and decide where I was going to connect all of this. Since LED's really don't use much current I felt it was ok to just tie into the interior light switch. You will need to find a bayonet splicer online or maybe an auto parts store has time - I got ours on amazon or ebay. I decided to route the wires first on the front starboard side starting at the switch going towards the bow- we have a 226 bowrider. I first took out the speakers to give me better access to the cup holders. Cobalt has a great feature of running wires in somewhat of a conduit along the edge - I used this as a guide and ran the wires to each cup holder and then ran the wires into the anchor locker. It turns out there was a little gap that I was able to snake the wire thru in the front starboard side and all the back to the stern. At the stern I eventually want to add LED's to the swim platform so I added a bunch of wire wound it up - terminated the wire the ends and zip tied it to where you can't see it. The only thing left was for me to snake wire on the port side to the switch area. I'm kinda anal and I soldered all my splices and hit them with heatshrink tube and then wrapped them a little with electrical tape. Remember that LED's are polar dependent - so it is critical that you keep the positives and negatives consistent or they won't work.

I purchased some LED live-well LED's for above our swim platform - I haven't installed them yet - to be honest I'm scared to drill holes in the fiberglass. I have an extended platform and will mount them just above it. I figure that above the swim platform really doesn't get that wet and a live-well LED is submersible - they should work pretty well. I've attached a picture of our finished product -- good luck

3pointstar

 

Tonka I have a good friend that has a smaller Fountain performance boat-- it really is very nice. However, she has made numerous comments on the layout of the 226 and how much more room there is to "do" stuffs. Yes, the overall layout is in my world perfect - swivel seats where everyone can talk to each other without hassle and enough room for to sit or be comfortable.