12 V Lighting

[crappie55409]

I have a fish house 7x14 that is wired up primarily for 120V with one tiny light wired as a 12V. I would like to convert this so that i can light up the shack using only 12V battery. Is this something that i can accomplish simply buy using some sort of converter or would my electrician friend have to tear out all the wiring and rewire the whole house? I dont know much about electricity clearly.

Thanks for any input!!

crappiehunter

[Eric Wettschreck]

You can use the same wire. you'll have to put in 12v lights but that's not a big deal.

[Nordern]

We had our skid house set up for 110V also but we did use it for 12V when we did'nt have a generator. We used the same wiring and just changed the light bulbs out to the 50W 12V bulbs. To make things easier since we only had 1 circuit we made a cord that connected to the batteries that we plugged into one of the outlets to supply battery power.

[tsande00]

We used the same wiring and just changed the light bulbs out to the 50W 12V bulbs.

They have better bulbs than that out now. (I too have the 50W 12V in my house). There are 15W florescents that seem to put out close to the same amount of light with a fraction of the power draw. Personally, I just bought some 12v LED dome lights that I am going to try installing in various spots throughout the house. If that doesn't work I'm going to go with those 15W florescent. The 50W draw too much juice IMO.

[Polar Bear]

You can indeed use the same wiring. I've built and wired 3 houses and I really like the flourescents. They draw much less power than either the 12 volt bulbs or the leds per lumen. However, they only work well in a warm house. Its usually not a problem because a perm is usually nice and warm anyway. I'll give you another tip: When fishing crappies at night lower your light just above your hole. The crappies seem to be drawn to the light (or maybe to the minnows attracted to the light). While using artificial lights to attract crappies is illegal in MN while boat fishing, I have never had a game warden complain about having my flourescent just above the ice while winter fishing. I consistantly catch many more crappie using this technique compared to my ice neighbors fishing nearby.