Pontoon Boat & Deck Boat Forum

Has anyone added under seat LED lights at their seat bases shining toward the floor in their boat? How many strips did you use and do you like them? I like these better than doing the lights on the exterior of the boat.

Coastal night lights has them in 12" strips or 15' rolls in solid color or red, green, blue (RGB) selectable. A lot of guys on thehulltruth.com forum use them in their center consoles and really like them.

Anyone have any pics?

Thanks

I put leds near the top of the seat base on all the bench seats on my pontoon. Since the seat cushions protrude over the base, they provide indirect lighting. I bought mine at Wal Mart in the boating section. They were in 24 in strips with a peel and stick 3m tape. Since they are a two color, white and blue, I used a three position on/off/on toggle switch and some three conductor thermostat wire to power them. I love the way they look and no problems so far. I am at work now but I can post pics when I am home tomorrow. Well worth the time and expense, next I will be doing under deck leds..

I added green rope lights under the front edge of my boat seats. Got a 16' long piece on Amazon.

I did a simple circuit that is a continuous loop. The wires start at an unused switch in my console, go down through the deck, come up in the front right couch where I connected them to a length of rope lights across the front of the couch. At the other end of the couch, I transitioned back to wire and went under the deck and across to come up in the front part of the front left couch. Transitioned to rope lights to go in front of that couch and then transitioned back to wire to go under the deck and then back up to contine for the rear seats.

We love them. My wife and her girlfriends are dancing queens and we crank the music and they feel like they're in a disco.



I did green because, at the time, there was some controversy regarding the legality of using blue lights on boats. That has since been cleared up in my area so I added blue under deck lights to the outside. (Love them too.)

(In case you're wondering, flashing blue lights are illegal in SC. There is no law against solid blue lights and they have become very common on my lake.)

I rarely use the green interior lights while underway except putting around while the girls dance. They do affect your night vision.

Klus makes nice extrusions to put the LED strips in that you can buy on ebay. I homerun the wires from each of the lights to a bus bar in my console.

This is what mine looks like.

Sweetwater installed mine as an option, not sure how many under each seat , but not as many as shown in pictures here.
They are a nice touch, mine are blue. I'm sorry I did not get the outside tube lights.
I did have the underwater lights installed on motor mount, but they're white and not deep enough.
A little disappointing actually.

Also note my lights are floor level mounted.

babock wrote:Klus makes nice extrusions to put the LED strips in that you can buy on ebay. I homerun the wires from each of the lights to a bus bar in my console.

This is what mine looks like.

I like that! Nice and clean. I'm going to look into that for mine. The only thing it lacks, is good lighting.

Is there a simple explanation on how to power additional lighting? I'd like to add some on top of the pontoons and inside the boat. I've got a factory switch on the dash for water lights that's doing nothing right now so I'll hook them up to that.

Thanks!

Dave

Coldbrew wrote:Is there a simple explanation on how to power additional lighting? I'd like to add some on top of the pontoons and inside the boat. I've got a factory switch on the dash for water lights that's doing nothing right now so I'll hook them up to that.

Thanks!

Dave

The easy way is to buy a couple terminal blocks or bus bars and home run your individual sets of light to the terminal block. From the positive , connect a wire to your switch. From the negative bus bar, make a connection to the negative bus at your fuse panel. I am assuming your existing switch is already fused.

What is nice about using a bus bar/terminal block method is that it is easy to add more lights to your existing switch. My doing a home run with the wiring instead of daisy chaining your lights, if you ever get a break in any of the wiring to on light, it doesn't kill all of them and makes troubleshooting way easier.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/6-Gang-Dual-Ter ... 6b&vxp=mtr

http://www.ebay.com/itm/10-Gang-Termina ... f5&vxp=mtr

Thanks! That's what I was looking for.

I bought these at Academy Sports. http://www.academy.com/webapp/wcs/store ... h.F2caglPZ

They are 27" strips that mount in a channel. They can be trimmed down if needed, I had to cut a few inches off for my shorter bench. I just unhooked my factory courtesy lights and wired these in to that existing switch. Super easy and I couldn't be happier. They match my underwater led's perfectly.