That's what I've been thinking about for quite some time now.
The current situation is that our fishing groups use these: http://www.greenmagnetfishinglights.com/typesoflights.html
They're a costly $190. They do work quite well, and their customer service is very good... but I'd like to create my own for (presumably) far cheaper and have it be far more effective.
There are a few negatives when it comes to these 4 foot long green monsters (that I envision the replacement would fix):
Length - Sometimes large whitebass will fight and end up tangled in the light and often the fish will be lost.
Weight - The light itself is buoyant and it requires a ~5 lbs weight on the end to keep it submerged
Energy drain - Two hooked up to a good 12v battery can drain it dead before the night is over and require some rerouting of the starter wires and it can be a bit of a pain. Fragility - Long plastic housing can be broken fairly easily.
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A few issues I see right off the bat:
No experience with green LEDs
12v supply
Suitable host
Performance when submerged (Enough light)??
The water tends to be anywhere from 10-30ft deep. Mostly murky water. I think the ideal setup would be a very floody light with small amount of throw (maybe a mule?). I'm not sure if 1 led could provide enough light.
What do you guys think? Feasible project? Any ideas?
Fantastic idea! Should be able to do 2 strips back to back to get light emitted in all directions.
One concern would be brightness. Would these strips give comparable or better output?
The other concern would be heat. Never worked with led strips, any issues having 2 strips back to back?
No clue…the encapsulant would wick the heat away better than air, and that will be dunked in one HELL of a liquid cooled heatsink
Make sure you use good thick wires, and provide some sort of eyebolt for putting on a cable or 550 cord or something so it doesn’t break the wires and go to the bottom
Not sure why there is such a massive pricing disparity since they seem to share equal specifications, besides for the one I linked being waterproof. That way you can just mount it to whatever you need.
They go pretty bright, they come close to 4ft florescent brightness, in my opinion.
My main concern for you though, is that these are not going to be in the same wavelength, and it seems that’s the operative function of a light for this purpose. You could test it out for pretty inexpensively, but I really doubt you will be able to match those lights you have. That is unless what the website of your lights states is a whole bunch of mumbo jumbo and all you really do need is a green light of some similar wavelength.
Another issue I see is that florescent lighting emits ultraviolet radiation, while the led’s will not. I don’t know anything relating to the fish but this UV light may also help attract them.
The problem with any sort of LED’s (including that strip lighting) is its single direction lighting, the tube light needs to throw light atleast 180 it not 270 or more.
OP do you need light to come out the top up towards the boat?
A faint amount of light illuminates the tip of the fishing rod. Lines set on the outer edge of the light (2-3 feet from the tube) tend to get the most action.
I drew this hyper-realistic picture to showcase the current setup.
Edit: Hired a graphics designer for an even more hyper realistic drawing of what I was initially planning.
The good nights you will see huge pods of shad (small diamonds) in a tornado formation circling the lights; It is absolutely amazing to watch. The white bass (larger diamonds) tend to follow the shad schools.
I have no idea if their mumbojumbo is accurate. All I know is that something about it does work. We’ve been out fishing on crowded nights with other boats within spitting distance and outfished the other guys 10 to 1.
Did I inadvertently post something naughty that I can’t see?
I had my wife do a sanity check and she says I'm crazy. I then said . . . um, never mind. Your man in the boat diagram is fine. It's me that is apparently naughty.
That looks like quite a contender, especially at that price. Looks like they also have LED versions too. Very interesting. I do wish they had some sort of data sheet on runtimes or something like that... so difficult to compare and contrast.
