Re: [Amel Yacht Owners] Masthead lights do not last
Bill Kinney <greatketch@...>
Pat,
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First, do not worry about your instruments. Modern sailing instruments are designed to run on normal system voltages from 10 to 30 volts and will have no problem with running off the 24V side of the Amel electrical system--unless your charging system is seriously out of whack. As I upgrade my instruments from the 70’s era “vintage” models, fewer and fewer things are connected to the 12V converters. Remember, those converters were installed because 24 volt instruments of a quality that Amel wanted were not available back in the mid 70’s when 24 volts boats were much rarer than then are today. They are never quite going to go away, because I still need a 12V source for my NMEA2000 network backbone, if for nothing else. There is one place where the converter is a great solution: running an SSB off it’s own dedicated converter. Boats with 12 Volt only systems can have a lot of trouble keeping the voltage up high enough (13.4V) to properly drive an SSB during transmissions without a charging source running. That big converter makes our SSB installations work better than a lot of other boats. If you have batteries that require occasional high voltage equalization, it is just good practice to turn everything off while that process is going on, including your 24 to 12 volt converters. Not all Amel’s have the navigation lights run off the converter. Mine does not. They have always run directly off 24 volts, and work fine. To be honest, I am mystified why anybody would still be fussing with incandescent lamps on the top of the mast. For me at least, the hassle of changing a masthead light is well worth the cost and effort of a well made, internally voltage stabilized, waterproof, LED fixture. Even if I wasn’t concerned about power draw at all, (and I am!) the mast head would be an LED fixture. It is mature technology these days, and well made ones do not require separate, external, voltage regulators.
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