Lumishore Eclipse DL55 Blue LED Downlight, Black Housing

The Lumishore Eclipse DL55 is a small, sealed overhead LED downlight built to throw clean blue light into the spaces you actually use after dark. Think the underside of a hardtop, a T-top, a radar arch, the deckhead in a cabin or head, or a flat panel over a galley. It's only 2.519 inches across the bezel and sits barely 0.83 inches deep, so it disappears into a headliner instead of hanging off it.

Lumishore builds these the way marine gear should be built. The body is black aluminum, the front is real glass, and the whole thing is sealed to IP67. That means it shrugs off a deck washdown and the spray that finds its way under a hardtop. The blue LED pulls just 0.4 amps at 12 volts, so you can run a whole row of them off a single small circuit without worrying about your house bank.

Why blue? Two reasons. It looks great washing across a deck at anchor, and it's easy on your eyes at night. Blue and red are the colors that let your night vision recover fastest, which matters when you're stepping from a lit cockpit back to a dark helm. That said, 3 watts of blue is brighter than a lot of folks expect in a tight cockpit, so think about where you aim it. Under a hardtop pointing down at the sole is perfect. Right at eye level, maybe not.

Install is about as simple as marine lighting gets. It's a two-wire hookup, positive and negative, no resistor or special driver needed. Cut a 2 inch (50.8 mm) hole in a flat panel, feed the two leads through, and the stainless steel spring clips hold the light snug from behind. No visible screws, no external bezel ring to corrode. We'd still run each light on its own fused circuit, a 1 amp fuse is plenty, and use proper heat-shrink connectors on the leads since they live in a damp world.

A couple of honest install notes from the water. The spring clips grab best on a firm panel between about an eighth and a quarter inch thick. If you're mounting into a thin fiberglass headliner or a soft liner, add a backing ring so the clips have something solid to bite. And this is a flat-surface light, full stop. It won't sit right on a curved rail or a rounded arch tube without a custom flat mounting pad. Plan the location before you cut.

Who's this for? Anyone adding overhead accent or courtesy lighting to a center console, express cruiser, pontoon, or sportfisher who wants it to look factory. A pair under the hardtop, a run down a companionway overhead, a few in the cabin, they all draw so little that adding them is a small wiring job, not a battery decision. Boaters who anchor out and want that soft blue glow on deck love these. So do folks who just want to find the cockpit steps at 2 AM without killing their night vision.

One more thing worth knowing. It runs on 12 volt DC only, and it's happy anywhere in the 10 to 15 volt range, so normal charging voltage won't bother it. It's CE certified, and the aluminum body doubles as the heat sink, which is part of why it stays this compact. If you're isolating dissimilar metals, and on a saltwater boat you should be, keep the stainless clips from sitting directly against bare aluminum where you can. A dab of the right barrier does the trick.

The DL55 is part of Lumishore's Eclipse downlight family, so it plays nicely with the rest of the line. You can wire it to a simple on/off switch or run it through the Eclipse Command Center for zone control. It's available in other colors and in a white housing too, so you can mix a blue accent run with white task lighting and keep the same clean look throughout the boat. Backed by a 3 year Lumishore warranty, and we're an authorized dealer, so if anything goes sideways it runs straight through us.