Hi Folks. Jeff from Marinebeam here. Great discussion. Hopefully I can clear some things up about polarity. All of our Marinebeam replacement LED bulbs correct for polarity. This is because your existing fixture with the original incandescent bulb didn't care about polarity --thus many are wired wrong (reversed polarity) by the boat builder. Our idea was to produce a replacement LED bulb that was plug-and-play, and wouldn't require you to change the polarity of your existing fixture wiring just to upgrade to an LED bulb. However, when replacing the old incandescent fixture with a completely new LED fixture, things are different. This is because you are disconnecting the wires anyway. So, not all of our LED fixtures have the polarity correction topology. The rational here is that the diode-bridge that corrects for polarity creates a voltage drop across the diodes that wastes a bit of precious energy, and really serves no purpose in the case of a fixture (because you are disconnecting and reconnecting the wires anyway, as mentioned above). NOTE that reversing the polarity when installing does not hurt the Marinebeam LED, but you should do a quick test when installing to confirm the lamp illuminates before making the permanent connection. If the lamp doesn't illuminate, just switch the wires. No harm done.
Hope that helps, and thanks to all for your patronage these last 13 years. We are here to help, so contact us anytime with your questions, comments, or ideas.
Hope that helps, and thanks to all for your patronage these last 13 years. We are here to help, so contact us anytime with your questions, comments, or ideas.
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