Under Water Lights

HID is definately the way to go. LED's aren't nearly as bright versus HID's and they don't seem to last any longer. IF water gets into either of them, the bulbs are toast anyways.

No, the thru hull holes that you cut in the hull of the boat are the same with both LED and HID. The electrical boxes used to run the HID's are usually mounted in very close proximity to the HID light (such as in the lazarette which is an open run to the HID light) so you shouldn't need to cut large holes throughout the boat, all you need is a basic power wire from the breaker panel to the HID electronic box.

LEDs are fine and are getting brighter with larger cluster.

The most important thing in my opinion is how they are mounted and if they are serviceable in the water. I really dont' want to put in a big hole in the transom jsut for lights since there are alternative. unfortuntaly, when installing surface mount lights, most yards still insist on drilling a hole under the waterline, instead of running the wires up on the transom and penetrate above WL with a clamshell.

if you run the wire above WL, this will allow you to unclamp the wire, unscrew the surface mount fixture and pull it up while in water if it needs replacement.

and before anyone tells me LED lasts "forever", I have a 6 month old Abyss Light with 3/4 of the LEDS dead.

instal cost depends on what you use and how you install them.

If you have access to the transom from inside the boat, installing surface mounts is just a matter of running a power supply line to the transom, drilling a hole above water line to get the wire thru.

on the outside, what you can do is fasten a piece of 3/4" starboard as a mounting pad for the fixture. 5200 plus a few screws will be fine. Then you attach the fixture to that mounting pad so that you can unscrew the fixtrue in the water if neded without having to worry about water getting into the screw holes. Run the wires up to the hole, seal and put a clamshell.

With good access, its 1 to 2 hours per fixture at the most.

obviously if you are to going to put some on the hull side, you can't really use surface mount, but the above will work well at the transom.

When i had the lights installed on the 70 footer I run, it was a little complicated due to the hull shape. I had to have the yard build a custom mounting block. Unfortunately, we coudlnt' get the wires up above WL because we have a fuel tank in the way, so we had to come in behind the lights.

then it got even more complicated when the yard failed to follow the instructions and apply sealant behind the fixture,. even though they were supposed to keep cooling passages clear. When they tried removing the fixtures, the wires ripped out on 2 of them. expensive mistake for the yard. Since we were ready to launch and i dind't want to wait a few days for replacement lights, I had them drill a hole in the mounting block so that we could coil extra wire in there, with a cover. Once i got the replacement fixture, I just dove in, pull the wires to the swimplatform, connected and sealed the connections then coil the wires back in the hole and screwed the fixture. simple. I can now replace those two without a haul out.

unfortunately, the one that failed is the one they were able to pull out to remove the sealant, it doens' t ahve the extra wire coiled behind

LED's CANNOT handle excess voltage. I made the mistake of plugging a 12 volt LED into a 24 volt outlet. It worked great for about three minutes, then about 3/4s of the bulbs burned out and the remaining 1/4 stayed lit. So if you have a voltage spike it will kill them. Also water in the housing will kill LED's also.

abyss lights come with regulated power supply to ensure the right voltage is supplied to the lights, so voltage spikes shoudln't be a problem.

btw...2 of the power supply that came with the 3 lights were DOA!! wasted a couple of hours crawling in the laz. checking the wiring, etc.... called them up, they replaced the power supplies.

and dont' get me started on corrosion, even though I bonded the darn fixtures! the one that fails shows corrosion around the lens... the others dont.