Panel lights or a single flood?

Bartman

Bartman

Administrator
Staff member
Joined
Mar 27, 2018
Messages
4,643
Location
New Jersey, USA
Hi all,

My new panel is almost done and I'm still hung up on one last detail. Should I have a single flood light to illuminate the analog instruments and leave the digital stuff to auto dim via the built in sensors or hook everything up to a dimmer, ditch the antique flood fixture and put light bars over the airspeed and altitude? The digital stuff (AV-30, Garmin comm and transponder) can be slaved to the dimmer except the engine monitor. There's already an on-off switch in the panel that is also the circuit breaker.

Curious to hear what all y'all think I ought to do.

Thanks!
 
Either is viable. My feedback is that I've done quite a bit of night VFR XC over the post 2 years, and have found that dimmer is better. I like to be able to get the cockpit very dark, with only the airspeed and altitude illuminated.
 
I guess it would depend for me. When I used to do lots of night flying, my mooney had individual lit instruments, and that was really nice. But I don't find myself at night often anymore. Both my current planes, 180 and citabria just have a flood lights. both are dimmable, and adequate for what I find myself doing. The 180 does have a G5, so I just reference that anyhow.
 
After kicking it around probably more than it needed to be kicked around, I went with the dimmer! I like the flood light in my Citabria but I can't guess how the auto dim functions of the electronics will respond to the flood light and they're all (except for the engine monitor) made to be dimmable so we'll see how it works out.

Apparently rheostats aren't in use anymore for the purpose of dimming cockpit lights, the new fangled was is waaaayyyyy more expensive! Naturally!

This is what I ended up buying, https://seatoneng.com/maxdim-9100-001-a-b/
 
Bartman said:
Apparently rheostats aren't in use anymore for the purpose of dimming cockpit lights, the new fangled was is waaaayyyyy more expensive! Naturally!

This is what I ended up buying, https://seatoneng.com/maxdim-9100-001-a-b/
Click to expand...

I think the issue is that LED lighting does not work well with rheostats, since LED light output is not linearly related to the voltage input. For LED lighting, a gadget called a pulse width modulator tricks the LED into the output you want.
 
On a side note, the MaxDim dimmer doesn't have a positive off detent even though it shows an off position on the placard that it comes with so I'm kinda happy I installed an on/off switch for the panel lights. :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top