In article t,
"Robert Haston" wrote:

Thanks. It looks like 24V and a converter for those who need it will work
best.

"Chris Newport" wrote in message
news:5659389.ncpoZvYXxa@callisto...
On Saturday 18 December 2004 9:57 pm in rec.boats.building Robert Haston
wrote:

How common are 36 or 48 volt systems in marine use? Is there some
specific
safety rule?

I want to make and sell an LED lighting system that gets much easier to
assemble and operate at these higher voltages.

Very rare or non-existant. I have never seen 36 or 48 volt, we
did have a 32 volt system on an ancient boat but I have not seen
32 volt since except on farm lighting systems and even those are
rare nowadays.

If you want to sell to boat owners you need to offer 12 and
24 volt options. Why not pick the best voltage for your
system and add a DC-DC converter from 12/24 ?.


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actually, if you are going to do an up-converter, there is ZERO
sense in making it "12V only" on the input side. make it work
from 10v-30v on the input side and you'll make everyone a lot happier.
and it certainly isn't hard to do. the boost converter control
chips from International Rectifier, among others, make this kind
of thing really simple to do.

the Europeans have gotten a lot smarter about this recently.
many European boats have 24v house systems and a lot of kit
is designed to work with that. the more recently designed
equipment works 10-30 VDC input (or something close to that)
so they can sell to either market (12V-centric or 24V-centric)
with only *one* stock-keeping unit and NO hassles for the owner.

think about it for a moment - if the lighting system is designed
for 12V-only input driving an up-converter, you end up with a
24V--12V *DOWN*converter driving the up-converter in the lighting
system. this is really silly, not to mention inefficient and
materially less reliable than need be the case.

with modern switching power supplies, there is ZERO reason to
make equipment intolerant of multiple input voltages, DC or AC.

-mo