CFL Flounder Lights

Incorporating CFL Flounder Lights on your boat ensures a quiet night out on the water. The Compact Florescent Light bulb hereby known as CFL has allowed many people to return to the use of a battery for flounder gigging.
Flounder Gigging of course started with people walking through the water at night in shallow water with a propane lantern designed for that purpose. That is something that can be done easily. We recently took advantage of a warm winter night and did some flounder gigging.
The way my friends boat is set up is with halogen lights powered by a generator. It certainly gets the job done, but some of the ambience is gone due to the generator noise.

Last night while taking a break we had the generator off and you could hear the roar of the ocean. What a peaceful and therapeutic noise that is. We were discussing how to run the flounder lights without a generator.

The discussion of course led to LED lights and CFL Flounder Lights. I think the prices of LED lights still have a little room to come down for this application. The CFL Flounder Lights will fit the bill. The problem is are there DC CFL light bulb?

The system will have a deep cycle Marine battery. If you go with the standard house alternating current then you would need to have an inverter. There is a huge loss for changing the current from direct to alternating.

If you plan on a 26 watt CFL on 120 AC that is the equivalent of a 100 watt incandescent light bulb here is how the math would work out:

26 watt light bulb /120 volts * 10(inverter conversion)= 2.167 amps after the inverter is used. This does not account for the losses of the inverter.

If you went to a 25 watt CFL on 12 V DC that is the equivalent of a 100 watt incandescent light bulb here is how the math works out:

25 watt light bulb/12 volts= 2.083 amps. You can cut it in half by switching to a 24 V DC bulb.

You can switch to the 12 V or 24 V DC CFL Flounder lights and not have the inverter. So our simple system would be a Marine Battery and 2 to 3 CFL Flounder Lights that would run approximately 12-20 hours depending on the particular battery you choose.

May the future nights of flounder gigging be quiet and bright for a long time.

GB²