Battery life at night

JeremiahBone

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Hey I have 1991 Larson Hampton 220 equipped with a 5.0 mercury Mercruiser; Dual batteries. My concern is while I am on the water at night I want to keep my lights on so other boats can see me, but don't want to be stuck on the water from a dead battery... any suggestions? Also I am new to boating.
 

MH Hawker

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Hey I have 1991 Larson Hampton 220 equipped with a 5.0 mercury Mercruiser; Dual batteries. My concern is while I am on the water at night I want to keep my lights on so other boats can see me, but don't want to be stuck on the water from a dead battery... any suggestions? Also I am new to boating.

you had better have at least your anchor light on. thats the law, and the power draw for that is very small and that can be reduced even smaller if its a LED, and unless that battery is bad it shouldn't be a problem but a jump box is good for the piece of mind
 

roscoe

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battery switch so only one is being used, and the other is kept as a backup.
 

Scott Danforth

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A good battery will power the anchor light for about 3 days, 5 days if its an LED. My group 27 house battery will power the anchor lights, the interior lights and the radio for days
 

JeremiahBone

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you had better have at least your anchor light on. thats the law, and the power draw for that is very small and that can be reduced even smaller if its a LED, and unless that battery is bad it shouldn't be a problem but a jump box is good for the piece of mind

I have a 3 pin Anchor light. Will 2 pin be universal or does my search for a 3 pin led light begin?
 

MH Hawker

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i do a lot of night fishing i run a anchor light. a black light. a 400 watt stereo a live well aerator. bait up lights and deck lights. that pulls 1 amp with out the aerator running and 4 with it, and over a 6 hour period of time it uses around 25 % of the reserve battery capacity from a group 29
 

ondarvr

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I have a 3 pin Anchor light. Will 2 pin be universal or does my search for a 3 pin led light begin?

​Google the number on current light and LED, shouldn't take more than a minute to find the right one.
 
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gm280

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LEDs, LEDs, LEDs, change out every light you are using to LEDs and relax. I bought the typical navigation bow and transom lights with the filament bayonet type bulbs, and then bought LED replacement bulb for them. That way I can use either or, if need be. Just keep the original bulbs as back up and go boating. If you replace the bow and transom lights with factory LEDs the cost go up really high. So the typical setups work just as well and allows you the option to use either filament bulbs or LEDs. And when you see the amount of light LEDs put out for the current draw, it is a win win idea. In fact every bulb on my boat project is LEDs. And that saves a lot of battery life for other things. JMHO
 

Augoose

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I fully agree with all the above comments - you won't drain a good battery down with just a single light, LED or otherwise. Dual batteries provide great peace of mind and for anyone wanting to take it one step further, I used an automatic battery cutoff device called "priority start" on an old jeep which I usually left sitting for months at a time. When your voltage drops below 11.8 volts, a switch opens thereby stopping unnecessary drain.

Since this is somewhat on topic, an easy way to determine how long your battery will last is to add up the draw in amps of all devices you want to run at one time. These specs usually can be found on the internet. Then compare the total draw in amps to that of the amp hour capacity of your battery - that will give you an idea of how long your battery will last. The other way to do it of course is to purchase a meter which measures current draw and place the leads of that meter in between your power supply and the load - the meter will then tell you what the actual current draw is.

For instance, I have a kayak set up with two led lights and a fish finder. I power everything with a 12v / 1300mAh capacity battery. This means that my battery can provide 1.3 amps of current for one hour, or 15.6 watt/hours. My fish finder draws .25 amps and the lights draw a total of .12 amps - for a grand total of .37 amps, 370mA or 4.44 watts. Right off the bat I can expect my battery to provide more than one hour of run time because my load is less than my capacity per hour rating.

There are of course other factors (charge capacity, voltage threshold, temp, rate of draw, etc) which play into this and better ways to calculate this (watt-hour), but speaking very generally if I divide 1300 by 370 if I measure in amps or (15.6 by 4.44 in watts), I get 3.51, meaning I might get about 3.5 hours of run time out of my 12v drill battery. However, my LED lights turn off when voltage drops to 11 volts and my fish finder stops working at 10v. I'm not truly going to get a full 3.5 hours but its a starting point. Keep in mind you never want to fully discharge some types of batteries.

Lets say your anchor light has a 500 mA draw - meaning half of an amp. If you have a Group 27 marine deep cell battery, it likely has a 90AH @ 20 hour rate, meaning the battery can provide 4.5 amps for 20 hours. Your actual load is a fraction of the available capacity and you probably won't be out on the water for 20 hours- all this assuming your battery is in good shape.
 

bruceb58

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Just don't discharge your deep discharge battery beyond 50%. If you have a 70AH battery that means you have 35AH to use. An anchor light is going to be 5W if it's a incadescent bulb. 5/12.5 = 400mA. If all you have is your anchor light, that will last for 87 hours.
 
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