Anyone travelling by boat in the evening or at night will appreciate a good on-board spotlight. It helps with confusing harbour entrances, when mooring and casting off or when searching for the nearest fairway buoy.
While halogen headlights from car accessories were usually used on boats in the past, most manufacturers now rely on LED technology.
However, there are also clear differences in quality here. There is also the type of remote control. Whereas years ago they were manual or wired, today radio remote controls are standard.
To compare the benefits of modern LED headlights compared to the traditional first-generation H3 headlights and to decide whether it is worth investing in a new headlight, we pitted different versions and generations against each other in a practical test:
Firstly, an H3 handheld searchlight from the 1990s, secondly a first-generation LED searchlight and, last but not least, two modern LED searchlights of the latest generation.
Whereas in the past the electrical output was almost the sole criterion when buying headlights, it now plays only a subordinate role in today's purchasing decisions.
The reason: the power consumption says little about the actual light intensity, measured in candela (cd). With conventional filament bulbs, such as those used in halogen headlights, more than 90 per cent of the electrical energy is converted into heat and not light.
In purely practical terms, we should actually be talking about heating bulbs instead of light bulbs. Modern LED technology can do this much better. Here, the proportion of luminous efficacy is at least 5 times higher. As a result, a 10 W LED light provides at least the same light output as a 50 W light bulb.
When buying headlights, you should therefore look for the highest possible light intensity. For comparison: halogen lamps reach around 7000 cd, modern LED headlights up to 350,000 cd. If you believe the manufacturers, this corresponds to 20 times that of a hand-held distress flare. Anyone who has ever seen such a torch in action will have a rough idea of what this means in practice for the brightness of a headlamp.
Another difference is the light colour measured in Kelvin (K).
Halogen light bulbs produce a comparatively long-wave light with a light colour of around 3200 K. LED lamps, on the other hand, emit a light colour of around 6000 K.
What is perceived as warm and therefore pleasant light in the living area of the boat is out of place in the searchlight, in whose light cone you want to recognise as much as possible. In addition, colours, for example whether it is a red or green barrel, are much harder to see in long-wave light.
This is why halogen headlights can make an obstacle visible, but it is often impossible to interpret it correctly.
A lot has also changed in terms of operation. In the past, the headlamp had to be steered in the right direction by hand, but today this is done by electric motors. The advantage: firstly, the operator of the headlamp does not necessarily have to walk from left to right across the boat when mooring, and secondly, the headlamp can be mounted at the highest point of the boat and thus has free beam options to all sides.
The maximum horizontal and vertical angles of the electric turning device are of course important. A horizontal angle of 360 degrees and the largest possible vertical angle of around 135 degrees is ideal.
Especially if the spotlight is to be mounted on the roof, it is important that it can be swivelled down far enough to illuminate the working areas on the deck or just behind the stern.
Back to our test candidates. We started with a classic 55-watt H3 deck spotlight with manual operation. The target object was a dinghy, which was positioned at various distances from the boat. Even at a short distance of around 50 m, it was still visible, but the colour plates (red and green, 30 cm x 30 cm) held up on board could no longer be clearly identified.
Around 100 metres away, the dinghy and the person in it disappeared completely into the darkness of the night.
Next, an inexpensive first-generation LED headlamp (Suparee Cree), which was fitted on boats around 10 years ago, was used. At 50 W, the electrical output was roughly the same as that of the H3 lamp. Due to the "colder" light colour (6000 K) and the significantly higher light intensity (24000 cd), the results at a distance of 50 m were considerably better than with the H3 light. Both the dinghy and the person were clearly recognisable. The same applied to the colour charts. Red and green could be easily distinguished. This only became difficult or even impossible from a distance of around 100 metres.
However, we found the radio remote-controlled engine control to be "tricky". It was difficult to align it precisely with the target. Each press of the button caused the angle to change far too much. If we had been searching for a person who had fallen overboard in an emergency, valuable time would have been lost. The Ferropilot searchlights show how it can be done better. Both could be aligned "to the point" with their radio remote control, although the vertical angle of the Model 150 seems a little too low at around 90 degrees.
While the "small" model 150 (75,000 cd) worked perfectly up to around 100 m and both the light intensity and the light colour were well suited for finding and identifying targets, the larger model 220 was in a different league: its 350,000 cd literally turned night into day, so that it was not so much the light as the visibility (without binoculars) that was the limiting factor.
The downside: at around 600 euros, the 220 model is also in the top league in terms of price. Our recommendation: If you are travelling within the city and can live with the vertical swivel range of 90 degrees, the Ferropilot model 150 is the best choice.
If you frequently travel in coastal waters and are looking for unlit fairway buoys, it is better to opt for the luxury 220 model. Cheaper LED headlights from online retailers also bring light into the dark, but their light output and operation cannot keep up in direct comparison.
