I do everything electrical with an eye towards energy conservation. If I keep my energy budget low, that means less battery power I need, less of a strain on what batteries I do have, longer time I can go without having to worry about "tanking up" the batteries.
I am almost completely incandescent light free onboard "Katie", belowdecks now there are none of those fixtures left. Common incandescent bulbs draw too much energy for me, so I have switched over to LED's and fluorescents. I also have an oil lamp, but we can discuss those in their own thread, if need be.
Here's what I have learned/done so far to be able to see while keeping amp consumption as low as possible...
The quickest, simplest way I've used is to simply get a cheap LED headlamp, and affix it in place in one way or another (see first pic below). WalMart and similar stores have a variety of headlamps available in the $7-20 range, and they work fine with one exception: they all use small batteries, AA or AAA. You can use rechargeable NiMH batteries to power them, but I prefer to have something which runs off of my house bank. That way there is no need to keep up with small batteries at all.
Another option are the small, 8 Watt fluorescents. I know Kmart sold these as "GE Sunbeam Stick-up Closet Lights", they are intended to be AA battery powered, using 8 cells. When I saw that, and did the math in my head (8 x 1.5V = 12V, a calculation that even *I* can make...
), I bought one immediately. This has turned out great. I disassembled the fixture, soldered wires to the battery terminals, and cut a small exit hole for the wires in the back of the fixture. These wires I then attached to wires which had fed an incandescent bulb, and voila', great light with a draw of only .6 amps/hour. That is about 1/4 of what the old fixtures needed. These lights I have seen priced from $3 on closeout up to $10 at full price, and I think either way they are a fantastic deal. One of them has served as my main cabin light for well over 6 months, haven't needed to change the bulb yet.
LED's are another electrical light source I use. I found a reading light fixture at Boaters World which retails for ~$25, it had a 20-LED "bulb" in it, and was preconfigured for 12V. The only thing I didn't like about it was that, with 20 LED's drawing at once, it used .5 amps/hour. I consider that to be excessive for LED's, and it seemed to me that the fixture didn't produce a great amount of light for having that many LED's. I know that LED's have marked differences in quality - you do pay for what you get. In my case, I decided to "fix" the problem by making my own LED bulb. I used 4 high-output LED's that I'd gotten from a car store (like Auto Zone, or Advance - great places to find pre-wired-for-12V LED's gizmos), a cotter pin, some electrical tape, and some epoxy putty to make a "bulb" which outshines the original, at 1/5th of its energy draw. I'll post some pics of it sometime.
Here's a LED headlamp, screwed to a bulkhead:
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