LED Product Testing

Bebi Electronics, Ltd. offers a lifetime (ours, not the projected sales life!) warrantee for all of our products, with the proviso that they not be subject to more than 16 volts DC (32 volts in the case of the Namu and Bēbē) and they have not been physically damaged (i.e.; a two year old with a saw and a bad case of curiousity).

As long term cruising sailors ourselves, we understand the importance of reliable running and cabin lights on a sail or power boat. Frankly, a warrantee is pretty useless 1000 nautical miles offshore in a cruising sailboat (a trait shared with parachute manufacturers)!

Since you don't want the unit to break in the first place, and we don't want to replace it (but we will, and quickly: We have a reputation to uphold!) we have six inspection and testing steps within the manufacture of our waterproof ultrabright LED Marine running and cabin lights.

As manufactured, LED's have a relatively wide spread of operating characteristics. For this reason, we 100% test all incoming LED's and sort them by their performance before we begin manufacture of the LED assemblies. By doing so, all of the LED's within our marine LED lights that we offer for sale have the same apparent brightness and color.

Here is why voltage matching is even more important than the apparent color: Most OEMs (including us) tie 3 LEDs in series so that the voltage drop inherent to semi-conductors decreases the power that the regulator has to work with. Since no circuit is 100% efficient, the lower the input energy (in watts) the regulator has to dissipate, the less is 'wasted'. As you can see (from above) there is a large varience, 8.5%, in the above data compiled from a single lot (10,000 devices). Over multiple lots, the maximum deviation is +/- 15% (total variation of 30%).

The life of any product is based on its weakest link. If one LED in a series string is drawing 33% (worst case) more current than another in the string, the reduction in life isn't even linear at 33%, but is actually closer to 50%. Although the matching of the forward voltage drop in series strings is recommended by all major LED producers, to the best of my knowledge, Bebi Electronics is the only company who is mass producing lights for the general lighting market who is doing actually so.

At each sub-assembly level of manufacture, our product is 100% performance tested before it is approved to be incorporated into the next level. After final assembly, 100% of our lights are then tested for 6 hours at a variety of voltage levels to ensure that when you mount our LED marine lights on your boat, that you will be completely satisfied.

Our testing doesn't begin and end though on the electrical performance of our lights on your yacht or powerboat. We know that our market also wants a durable product. When we say our LED lights are waterproof to one meter, we actually have successfully tested them at 1 atmosphere for 12 hours. Every light that we export is also subjected to a 2.5 hour vibration test over 56km of the world famous 'Hibiscus Highway'

Before Vibration Testing

Vibration Test Underway

We have found that even with our own experience, that there is often a lot to learn from people who are actually 'doing it'. Before we introduce a new LED running light or cabin light, we have them beta tested by cruising yachts here in Fiji. We also have some of the local charter boats, both power and sail, to further test our products in daily use.

A long term customer, Bob Wise of 'So It Goes', had a very unfortunate event happen on a passage, but he gave us a very nice, real life, data point about the water-fastness of our lights:

"...when sailing from St Thomas to Antigua, we had a chainplate fail, and lost the whole (mast,sails) rig. I've been designing a new rig here in St Croix so things have been a little shall we say...frazzled!

A sideways attaboy for your BEBI tricolorr is while we were in the process of cutting away the rigging, as the mast was doing a very convincing imitation of something trying to sink us, the Bebi tricolor was burning quite happily about thirty-five feet underwater, and continued to do so, until I cut the electric cables. Pretty amazing really!

Seriously, it was scary how bright that light is as from our cockpit you never see it at the masthead from the cockpit. But underwater on a moonless night it sure was bright down below as it lit up the whole hull!"

Don't try this one at home either, but we wanted to test the ignition characteristics of our resin blend and the results that we saw amazed ourselves (the unit used had a different hole pattern than our production lights, aside from that, it is identical to every other unit that we produce).

Testing marine LED anchor lights-Click to Enlarge

International Metal Artist Shane Bower with his forge

Exposing the light to the oxy-propane burner for 1 minute

Heat Testing Marine LED Anchor lights-Click to Enlarge

Flame Testing Marine LED Anchor Lights-Click to Enlarge

Even though the wire insulation had vaporized, and the lenses were discolored, the light STILL performed to our specs!

No need for a caption!