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Interior Lighting Struggles

Sandrews

Well Known Member
Struggling with the switching of my interior lighting. Overhead LED lights with both red and white. Red switched on for night flying. White switched on for visibility while loading. I want to put the lights on a rocker switch with on-off-on capability. Up white lights on. Middle lights off. Down red lights on. There are three wires powering the lights (red, green, white). Red wire(positive) green wire (negative) turns on the red LED light. Red wire(positive) white wire (negative) turns on the white LED light.

Easy to hook it up to a jump box and turn on separately but I'm struggling wiring up to a switch to get all to work correctly.

Please help!

Thanks
 
Red connects to ship's power via a CB. Green and white go to the "ON" terminals on the switch. Common goes to ground.

It's not normal to switch the ground side but I don't see why this won't work.
 
Maybe back up a bit.
Have you done much night flying? If so, ignore the rest of this and go your way.

If not, I suggest you evaluate what general cabin lighting is doing for you.

At night, anything other than instrument and switch illumination is doing nothing to help you fly and is not helping your night vision.

A white light for loading (in my opinion) is not nearly as useful as a Petzl type headlamp because the cabin light only illuminates the cabin and not all the other places you need light outside the airplane. At night I wear the Petzl as my loading light, preflight light, and emergency light. A cabin light is redundant functionally and (depending on how you wire it) a method to kill your battery.
 
perfect timing

...as I ponder what to stick in my overhead panel besides air vents, speaker, GPS antennae and rear headset jacks.

Obvious on the list is LED swivel map lights in different colors and a dome light for the baggage area. Or maybe not so obvious. My home strip is not approved for night ops. I have flown exactly 10 minutes of night flight in the past 20 years, when I was late getting into KCUB from Key West with Chatterbox's flight, but that was accidental. I won't be reading charts in the cockpit because I probably won't ever carry any.

Other that resale, overhead lights are starting to look silly for my particular plane. At least that's how I'm feeling for the moment.

Off to check Ebay for Petzl lights...
 
I've got Blue/white LED lights in my overhead console above each seat with a round rocker switch next to each light. They look like this (except they have 3 wires and not 2 as depicted):
MAPLIGHT-B-12-BLUE-12V-L.jpg


Other than to turn them on to test I've never used them in over 2 years of flying.
 
My experience, FWIW...

Baggage area dome light: pretty useful for evening or night-time loading and unloading. I covered the bottom of the F-732A longitudinal member (rollbar-to-bulkhead member) with a removable piece of aluminum and installed lights in there. Works great.

Map light (directional): in the same F-732A cover. Never used once. Looks cool, but a complete waste of time. This is probably because I don't carry any paper charts...they're all on the EFIS now.

Footwell lighting: VERY handy for getting in and out of the plane at night, and for illuminating the area when working (e.g., removing fuel pump cover during annual, etc.). Just two small "patches" of LEDs stuck to the bottom of the F-745 ribs. Highly recommend.

Panel lighting: LED strip (self-adhesive backing) stuck to the underside of the C-702 glareshield, as far aft as possible (snug up against the edge welt), dimmable, white light. Perfect. Usually used on a veeeerrrrry low setting. And white only, none of the colored stuff (there's a military study somewhere that says the best lighting is, indeed, white...red lights suck @ss, and green is only good if you're using NVGs or something like that).

Anyway, that's been my experience...YMMV!
 
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