Light and Air- 2 very useful things to have

Palm trees, cause sometimes refit photos are just too boring

It took us a few weeks to finally decide on the interior lighting. Actually, it took Mark a few weeks. His engineer's left brain kicked in on him and he began to over think the various options available. He spent hours checking out the lighting on friend's boats and pouring over technical specifications weighing power consumption against luminosity and output and considering the aesthetics of the fixtures.

LED lights are a popular choice but Mark just thinks the technology is not quite there yet. (Here's a link to an article by Nigel Calder if you really want to know some of the issues, how far the technology has come and how far it has to go.) We don't know a single person who has had them on their boat without some issues, usually a failure and since these lights aren't exactly cheap and aren't in ready stock in many places we were hesitant to use LED for the interior lighting. I just want to turn on a light when needed and have it work and not be a blindingly blue white color. We are putting LED nav lights on Ceol Mor but that is because there really isn't any other power efficient option at this time.

So we began to look into other options. Halogen and incandescent lighting, along with not being terribly power efficient produces a lot of heat. When you are living your life in a wee box, a small amount of heat can quickly make things unbearable. Traditional fluorescent lighting has drawbacks as well and we did not want to be revisiting this topic again in 2 years. We want to to be done with this.

After seeing the CCF lights on our friend Tim's boat and looking at the technical data, Mark became convinced that what we need is cold cathode fluorescent lighting for the general lighting and reading lamps. Easy peasy, right? WRONG.

Our order-except one fan which was out for testing and 9
linear CCF lights which have yet to arrive.

After 4 emails and one or two phone calls to Taylor Made to ensure that all of the lights we needed were available, we put in our order ( 7 chrome Futura reading lamps, 4 bicolor linear lights and 9 linear lights) and waited.  Instead of our order, what we got was an email letting us know that the bicolor CCF lights were no longer available. Even though we had assurances from Taylor that the were, turns out the were kidding. They aren't available. Apparently Taylor Made is phasing out its CCF lighting. We would have to instead go with 4 bicolor LED lights which were not only NOT CCF but were round. Round lamps interspersed with linear lights. This would be fine with me, but Mark has issues with things not matching and being exact. Its an engineer thing, you wouldn't understand.

After agonizing over whether to change all the lights to matching LEDs or just let it go, Mark decided to let it go. So we have dome lights in the head, galley and chart table which do not match the other general lighting and that is ok. (but if you want to wind him up, come aboard and point it out ;) )
I am so proud of him.*sniff* He has come so far from the man I first met with the white house-white walls, white floors, white furniture etc. Done sometimes is as good as perfect.

Now its on to fans. We live in the subtropics and have endured 100+ Fahrenheit days in the summer. A boat can get stupid hot. Since we are planning to spend time in the even hotter tropics, fans are something a bit more important than just a nicety. Steve on Siempre Sabado is in Baja, Mexico which is really stupid hot so when he sang the praises of the small Caframo fans, I paid attention. I even went so far as to dutifully stand in front of the fan display at West Marine seeing which model produced a stiff breeze and was impressed by the windage of the small and unobtrusive looking Caframos. These things are great. So when Mark asked me what my preference for fans was I told him.

When our shipment arrived I was surprised at how enormous the box was. When we opened it, I was greeted not by boxes full of the small but mighty Caframos but by seemingly huge Caframo Sirocco fans. 9 of em. The lack of a cage on the smaller Caframos apparently bugged Mark's sense of aesthetics and he thought that these much larger fans were an even better choice. I know from my trials at West Marine that these were in fact good fans but man oh man are they big. HUGE. I suppose the good news is that if we ever encounter no wind we can just open the hatches, use the gimbal feature to point the fans at the sail and begin to sail with the gale force winds generated in our saloon. I also no longer need to worry about the decor in the boat, our decor theme is now fans.

We have quite a bit of installing to do in the next week or so and we are still awaiting the arrival of our linear lights. I'll post photos of the installed lights and fans as soon as we've completed the installation.