LIGHTING our SAILBOAT. (Refit!) [S4E51]

Hello, and welcome back to Magic Carpet. It has been a long time since we have been cozy in this boat. In fact, I don't know if we've ever really been cozy in this boat. This is probably the messiest area of the boat, which is why it's the one I'm showing you last. When we bought it, it was kind of moldy and not in great shape and filled with stuff. It smells a little bit musty because it is a boat that's been sitting here, but I mean it smells like most boats that you find around here. And one of the first things we did was rip everything out and start work. And since then, it has been a huge saga of work, which many of you have followed along for. We've ripped out deck beams, we've ripped the walls apart, we've taken out all of the And now things are slowly starting to really come together and the finished product is starting to be more than simply an idea. It's starting to become a bit of a reality. Lighting. Lighting in boats is something that historically Aladino and I haven't been very good at, either on Magic Carpet 1, our first boat over in Europe, or even necessarily in these videos at times. But it is something that undeniably creates a world of difference to how a space feels and how a space functions. And so as we go to all the effort of refitting this boat into something beautiful and functional, we want to make sure that that last piece of lighting is just as beautiful and just as functional. But like I've already mentioned, this is not really our strong suit and we have a lot of learning to do. So we have some help from an expert. Hello! It's currently 9.56, we have four minutes until our scheduled meeting. I'm really hoping the internet holds out, internet is always a bit of a struggle out here. We are about to meet a very interesting person. Not only do we consider him the expert of lighting, he is an author, he is an RYA instructor. And he's gone cruising for a year or two with his family, his wife and children. We're talking about one of our subscribers and patrons, Leon Schultz. We've exchanged lots of nice emails with Leon over the years. And when we bought Magic Carpet 2, he emailed us excitedly and told us that he's actually a freelance consultant for a company that specializes in yacht lighting and he'd love to set us up with lights. We said, Leon, that's extremely nice and yes please, but first we have to demolish this whole boat and then we have to start rebuilding this whole boat and it's going to be a long time before lightbulbs even cross our minds. So can we please talk about this again in a year? And well, it's been a year. You can see my boat, pleasant light on board. Now I know everyone is sick of zoom at this point. So this video isn't just going to be a recording of a zoom presentation. But I do think you should watch this little demonstration of the difference good light can make. And then we can go try some stuff out on Magic Carpet 2. Let's look at this example. It's a classic boat from the 70s. Let's start with some indirect lighting. So we have light where we really need it so that you can, for instance, do the dishes while you don't disturb the people in the salon. So what we now want to do is to get some light on the sides because now suddenly the boat has become wider before the width of the boat ends where the light ends. And that's, of course, why the modern boats have windows in the hull. So the people who go on the boat shows have the impression of the boat is wider. Still you have now, you can say, caves, lit up caves. So if you now have some strips under the cupboard, for instance, then you really have the full width and instead of caves where the light was, now you have cupboards hanging along the hull. So this makes that the eye really sees the hull and the cupboards are facing inbound. We've created width. Now we want to create height. And there we can start off with the flooring. If you dim it down, you can also have it on during night time so you know where you put your feet at night when you're anchored on. I forget to switch them off. They are on all day, actually, because they don't consume any much power because it's LED. So now the height, that's the bulkhead. And if you really want, you could even let down on the shelf, see the change of color in the ceiling. So the thing is that if you have a spotlight with a good color rendering index and you shine onto the surface on the table, it lits up the ceiling and changes the color of the ceiling. So it's really the table litting up the boat. And then if you really want to be fancy, you could even lit up here where the windows are because the brain likes to have light coming in where portholes are. And now comes, of course, the magic. That's the dimmer. And here you can do it according to your mood. I mean, if you dim it down, you can have it for cozy nights or for working or whatever. There's a lot more that Leon covered. But first, let's try out some different lights on magic carpet, too. One there that we angle towards the sink. And then one over there that we sort of gently angle towards the cabin side. Personally, being someone who has never thought too much about how to light a space, these examples really opened my eyes to how much of a difference it can actually make. And I'm very excited to try some out. So in front of us, we have a battery. We have some light strips and we have a whole box of light samples, which Boat System sent to us to try out. Yes, huge thank you to Leon and to Boat System. Boat System is a Swedish company, which is why I sound like an idiot trying to pronounce it. But I think it just translates to boat system since they specialize in boats. So these are kind of some reading lights that we wanted to see in real life. And then over here, I have lots of down lights. So what are the big differences? The biggest difference from what we got out of this is the strength that they have, the lumens. And these all exist in different angles. They can shine a scope of 50 degrees, of 30 or of 15. And what we've learned is basically 50 degrees. If you want to illuminate a wide section, like the entire floor space here, if instead you just have a table here, then 30 degrees would be enough. Or if it's more of a spotlight, maybe onto a bulkhead, onto a barometer or a frame, then 15 degrees is ideal. The one that I'm kind of liking the most for ourselves is the Leia. And this one is an all what feels to be aluminum housing, and it does swivel. That's something I really like. And also, this one, again, is a bit of a stronger one. 220 lumens using only two watts still, which is pretty crazy. And they all come in different color temperatures, too. So we're going to have to choose that. But I think about 3000 is a really nice color temperature that I think we're moving towards. Totally. And then over here, we have a whole assortment of tapes. And then there is the difference of, again, how many lumens. So the MIDI is really powerful. It has this opaque plastic, so it diffuses the light and you don't see the dots. Whereas instead, the Mini Sleeve, you can see the LED dots. But it is also especially a much weaker light at only about, what was it, 150 lumen? Yeah. So it's really more just ambient and coziness. Whereas we think we're choosing the MIDI in many places over countertops, where it's like really functional. And bot system makes this nice little profiles. This one here symbolizes a groove that we will try to make ourselves with a router where we can. But if you're just retrofitting and you can add this wooden strip somewhere, then they do provide these, which is pretty cool. So the things that really stood out from Leon's presentation to me were to create width and to create height. The other thing that stood out to me was how much of this is done with indirect lighting. The goal is to actually hide the light source as much as possible. At the very end, we can choose a few decorative reading lamps. But most of the work will be done with LED strips and different kinds of ceiling lights or spotlights. Well, I think the MIDI is more functional because it's brighter. Oh, one would look super great here. Can we have a look at what that looks like? That's lovely. Let's just take a measurement here from here to here. This looks really good. And that's 2800 Kelvin. What's this one? This whole process took a really long time. We had to think about color temperature, brightness, installation, wire run, and artistic choice, like what do we want to highlight and what should fall into shadow? We focused on the edges, lighting the hall, lighting the floor, the bulkheads, the ceiling, deciding where perhaps we'd like to have centerpieces, like a fireplace or a piece of art, which could get tastefully highlighted by an artfully placed spotlight. We thought about practicality. What if we want to read over here? Or what if we open this cupboard? Or what if we're at anchor somewhere and we just want to see, but we don't want to consume much power? But eventually, we came out the other side with a clear vision and a plan that we're very happy with. Oh my gosh, you guys, what a process. We've just spent literally a day and a half sort of figuring this all out. But I think we've come to our conclusion and I'm going to share it with you. So we started in the saloon and first we had to create height. And that's done by having really nice illumination along the floor and along the ceiling. So we're starting with mini strips along the bottom of the settees. To illuminate the height of the boat and the ceiling, I think what we'll do is we'll have bulkhead lights and we'll have it shining along the whole width of the bulkhead. And that will really create not only height, but also a bit of depth as I'm standing here in the galley. And I look forward to that bulkhead and it's nicely defined and illuminated. For width, it's important to illuminate the parts of the hull that you can actually see, which will be precious little in our case, but we will have sort of openings here and here where you can see through to the hull, just like we have a magic carpet. So this open compartment, we will illuminate nicely with a midi strip, which is the LED strip that's a little bit brighter. So that's for our width. Now for floor lights and table lights, if we eventually get a table, we're going to have just a few stuck in the ceiling. These are really a challenge for us because unlike a more modern boat that has a liner or that has false fronts where the wires can run behind, with us, what you see is what you get. So wires will have to run along the beams. Now we can do a decent job hiding them with little conduit pieces and whatever, but it'll still be visible. So we don't want to have wires like, for example, running up the middle of our cabin side here. So it will have to be sort of relegated to the corners and these sections. One will sort of illuminate the bulkhead and whatever we have going on here, we'll have a piece of artwork or something on the bulkhead. And then one in the middle will be pointed down to illuminate the eventual table that one day ends up happening here. Oh, and then we've got four reading lights. So a reading light here, here, here, and here, so that anybody sitting down to read can do so. So yeah, that's the plan. We've got the height with the floor to the ceiling. We've got the width, hall to hall, and we've got functional reading lights when we need them. And we also have some ceiling lights to illuminate sort of the sides and edges of things. I think Leon will be proud of us. In the galley, I think this was probably the most challenging area because there's a lot of sort of nooks and crannies. And so if we really want to be illuminating all the edges, that gets a little bit more difficult in here. But I think what we've decided on is to have midi strips running underneath the cabin side here to really illuminate the stove and the countertop. We'll have the same midi strips running along the beam right here. And then over here, we're also going to have midi strips, but placed a little bit differently. Instead of running along the edge here, we actually found that it looks really nice when we run them like three smaller sections along each of these beams. That provides really nice even light to the whole chart table, and it actually illuminates the beams, which looks really, really beautiful. In the quarter berth, we're going to do a long strip of mini lights. So very, very subtle, not too bright, but just to sort of illuminate like the edge of the quarter berth, illuminate the hall. I think one of the big difficulties was defining height here. I think what we've decided to do is put one small strip of mini lights, so these are very dim, underneath the stove here. And that will just kind of illuminate the floor and define that space right there. And then we'll put another small strip of mini light underneath the chart table. As far as height goes, what we've decided, I think, is to go for two ceiling lights over the sink. One will shine down onto the sink really nicely, and the other one will sort of shine down a little bit onto the other sink, but also illuminate this corner here. Speaking of corners, I think we'll also have kind of a reading light over the chart table. Not only will that be useful for the chart table, but we can also flip it up and use it to illuminate the ceiling. Moving on to the head, this is another space where we want bright functional lighting similar to the galley, but of course for it to also look beautiful. So the countertop will be stretching kind of bulkhead to bulkhead, so I think we're going to have another midi strip running underneath the cabin sides here to illuminate that countertop. Then we'll have three overhead lights to define a bit of depth. I think we're going to go for a mini strip underneath the beam shelf here. Same goes for up in the v-berth. We're keeping it pretty simple. Two long strips of midi lights along the edge of the v-berth to define the edges, and then we will do two reading lights on either side. So that's the plan. Now to send it to Leon and see what he has to say. Leon liked our plan, so we put in a big order for lights and we'll slowly start installing them along with all the other boat jobs we have going on. But I have to say, although this was a long process, it was also a fun one. Even though our boat is so far from finished, the warm glow of these lights made it instantly feel more homey than the big flood lights we use while working. I can imagine it now, anchored in a remote bay, our batteries full after a day of sunshine, curled up in the saloon with a good book, the soft glow of the lights illuminating all the work it took to get us there. I can imagine standing in the companionway, camera in my hands, slowly panning over the glowing interior while something simmers on the stove. I can imagine one day when this refit is behind us, looking at each other over a glass of red wine and using the words of David Foster Wallace, laughingly saying, well, that was a supposedly fun thing that we'll never do again. Thank you so much for watching, everyone. We're so happy that you have been enjoying this series and we really look forward to bring them to you every single Friday. We can't wait to get back out onto the water and start sharing some adventure stories with you in a boat that is well lit and well made that we can really feel good about. Huge thanks to our patrons for making this all possible. If you'd like to become a patron for as little as $2 a month, I will leave the link in the video description. We really, really appreciate your support. And in exchange, we publish real-time updates every Tuesday. Oftentimes, those real-time updates are little vlogs that don't ever get published anywhere else, so they're patron exclusive. Sometimes they are articles written by me about some of the adventures we're doing along with photographs. It really depends, but those are available on Patreon. And an extra big thanks to these folks who always go the extra mile to make sure that Magic Carpet keeps being produced. We will see you all in the next episode.