That JDM link is $35 for 2 bulbs. Pretty pricy. I think I’m gonna try the Sylvania Zevo for about $20 bought locally. I mainly want them for my motorcycle. It has seperate turn signals so I shouldn’t have to worry about the flasher relay.
That whole CK bulb stuff is a real pain. I need to look into it more.
It’s a little better. They’re much brighter bare, but the lenses must filter out much of its spectrum. I tried white LED’s, but the filtering was even worse.
I’ve always had issues with brake leds not using the reflector properly. I think with shallow reflectors we need to use bulbs that fire into the reflectors.
I’m gonna get some Zevo bulbs and report back.
NEVER use white LEDs behind colored lenses, especially red.
White LEDs have a very low red content, so will filter down to a dim washed-out sickly orangey color.
Red LEDs behind red lenses lose very little light. In fact, the relatively monochromatic light looks way better than incandescents, as well as transmits most of its light through the lens.
Not to sound like Mr Glass Half Empty, but open the package carefully so you can return them.
1.5W draw means a theoretical best equivalent of about a 10W-15W incandescent. Prob more like 7W.
Just based on my own experiences…
I’ll see if I can get video sometime. It’ll be the first time shooting video on my dslr.
It was worth trying since I had them anyway. Like I said, the red LED’s still lost a lot of light. Not more than half, but enough to easily notice. It must be due to a slight mismatch between tints of the lens and LED. My ambers take two bulbs, and I used two different brands with different shades of amber. One shows through the lens very brightly, and the other is subdued significantly, but both bare LED’s are roughly the same. I put one of those amber LED’s into my brake housings and they were nearly as bright as the red LED’s.
Okay, that makes sense. Those lenses are heavily tinted, and if designed right, LED lights show through almost perfectly.
2 sets of ambers I got had slightly different tints, one more yellowish and one more orangey. Clear lenses, so for me it made no difference.
But “red” traffic lights and such are called “traffic red” or better, Portland orange, ie, an orangey shade of red. (Similarly, “traffic green” is slightly blue-green.) PO/TR red is just way more noticeable to the eye than deep red.
Anyhoo, picking red-red LEDs will be filtered down quite a bit, whereas PO/TR LEDs will shine right through.
Thankfully, none of the lights I tried were red-red, but the proper shade, PO.
I was pretty confident about these Zevo bulbs after every YouTube video I saw gave a very positive review. I’m giving them a thumbs-up as well.
This is the style of bulb. Note how it fires backward into the reflector.
These are more expensive than some other brake bulbs at $25 for a pair (local Autozone), but these work really well and should be reliable, so I’m okay with the price.
There are two separate LEDs per side on these bulbs. A low beam and a high beam.
I bought the 1157 size to put in my motorcycle (2057R to be exact). Here is the low beam comparison. It’s hard to see the color difference. The left side is more red while the incandescent bulb on the right side has more of an orange glow. Brightness is about the same (Zevo is maybe a tad brighter). Note that the light pattern is just as smooth and even as the stock bulb.
Here’s the high-beam comparison. You can tell the Zevo is brighter than the incandescent. Nothing wrong with that!
By far the biggest advantage here is the speed in which the LED lights up. I did a video which really shows the difference. I can flash the brake lever quickly and the incandescent doesn’t even have time to get up to full brightness. It’s a crappy night video so I need to reshoot it. EDIT: Eh, I don’t feel like reshooting. Here you go.
I’m debating putting these in my car. It uses the brake bulbs as blinkers so I’ll need to swap the flasher unit. Plus I’ve already got an LED 3rd brake light. It’s kind of nice having the hyper flash to tell me that a bulb is not working and I’d hate to lose that. Then again, maybe the instant on/off would make it easier to see. IDK yet.
It would certainly reduce the heat back there in the tail light sockets.
I have been thinking lads. Has any tried ducting air to keep the LEDs cool? Not a perfect solution as it would only probably work while the car is moving but you could duct air from the fan. We use to do this to air filters.
It sounds silly but i think you could use a ram air that sits on the top of the headlamp to keep it cool? It only has to be tiny make it super thin so it looks stock.
See my earlier post (#136) about that.
You can “weigh it down” some with a small resistor, just enough to fool the sensing circuit but still trip if the bulb itself goes wonky.
Trial’n’error…
Well you don’t want to direct super hot air from the radiator fan onto it. I mentioned earlier it might be good to make some fresh air ducts to blow on the heatsinks. Just like race cars use brake cooling ducts. That would probably making them last many more years.
I was thinking of using pvc pipe painted black. I haven’t had much time to work on it, though.
I don’t have a sensing circuit. I have a thermal flasher, so when a turn signal or brake bulb burns out I can tell because the thermal flasher will blink double speed. You lose this when you use LEDs.
Just be careful if you’re going to be scooping outside air.
Æons ago, I ran “dryer-hose” from my air-cleaner body straight-down and up to just beneath the bumper to get cooler outside air and get maybe a half-psi “boost” at highway speeds.
Helped a lot, but also ended up with an ACB full or sand, pebbles, and tree-crap that I’d have to clean out every month or so.
Nope, that’s a sensing-circuit, all right!
A thermal flasher counts on the load-current heating up a bimetallic strip that makes/breaks the contacts. Heats up, pulls away. Cools down, snaps back. Rinse, repeat.
With too low of a load, it never heats up, so the light just stays on steady when you activate the turns.
With too high of a load, it “strobes”, brief pulses of light (heats up fast), same or longer “off” cycles (roughly the same time to cool down).
The sensing circuit (in the relay) “knows” what the current should be, and if too low, just flashes the relay at double-speed. It’ll always be about a 50% duty-cycle, no matter what.
I can’t tell if you’re serious or if you’re just pulling my leg. You seem to know the basics of how a thermal flasher works but you should also know there is no sensor inside.
This part is correct.
The rest of what you said is incorrect.
When the load on the circuit drops, like when one of the 2 bulbs burns out or you swap an incandescent bulb with an led, the flasher rate goes up. It starts blinking roughly at double speed.
I’ve never seen a flasher unit with too high a load. That would be like adding a 3rd bulb to the circuit. I’ve never done that so I don’t know what would happen.
There is no sensing circuit in the relay other than the bi-metal strip. The metals used and the amounts of them are carefully chosen for a 2 bulb load.
Thermal flashers have been around since before the age of electronics. They are a purely mechanical device and there are no electronic circuits inside it.
I have been thinking about this and yes, it should be possible (and most likely already happens with most headlights) to take the little bit of air that gets through the crack around the headlights and duct it to the LED.
In many cases running the radiator to a water cooling setup on the LED’s would actually keep them cooler then letting them be air cooled. The radiator generally sits around 190-210f depending on the car and conditions. (or around 95-100c, where most LED’s are binned and designed to work). Air cooling could easily have the LED’s at upwards of 250f+ on the other hand.
The issue here is tapping into the radiator would not be the simplest or most reliable option as an after market option.
Tapping into the car’s cooling system is just rediculous. I assume your just kidding as I can’t tell for sure.
From a cooling standpoint it actually makes a lot of sense as I said above, it would end up keeping the LED’s cooler if they are producing a fair amount of heat (short of a fan on the LED anyways).
Underhood temps can easily exceed 150-175f and the small heat sinks they have could easily need another 75-100f+ over that to dissipate the heat.
Final temps = 225-250f+
Compared to the cooling system that sits at around 190-210f in most cars and you can see that hooking it up to the radiator would actually keep the LED’s cooler in most cases.
Now like I said, it is not practical for a retrofit due to most people not being capable of properly modifying their cooling system but I would not be surprised at all if an OEM has or will do it this way, although they appear to be going to laser headlights instead in increasing the LED output.
No, it really doesn’t make any sense. If you wanted to go water cooling, it would be many, many times better to build a separate cooling system with a small pump and reservoir and air to water heat exchanger. This system would start out at room temperature instead of 190 + degrees Fahrenheit. That’s 100 degrees cooler right off the bat.
It’s still not practical though because there’s no easy way to pull the heat out of the LED bulb assembly.
If you wanted to build a mildly complicated cooling system for the headlights, just use a small electric fan to blow fresh outside air across the heat sinks.
I’m considering a very simple cooling system of an air duct to catch air at the front of the vehicle and blow it across the heatsink. This would drastically reduce temperatures roughly 95 to 98 percent of the time the lights were on. And that’s really all you need.
I have built a few a2w systems on cars before and it is not all that simple. It also hurts the cooling to the main radiator and requires you to usually disassemble the front of the car to install it. Far from a simple setup. Nor a cheap setup, you would easily spend $100+ for automotive grade A2W parts.
Tapping into the radiator on the other hand would only require 2 hose T adapters to be installed and some hosing at a cost of maybe $25 and a half hours worth of work.
Now if you take simplicity and cost out of the picture, then yes, a separate cooling system would give better performance for sure. Although you then have to worry about the pump working the same way you have to worry about a fan. The fan would be the far simpler and easier option between those and about the same reliability.
Basically an A2W system for the headlights would be a silly amount of overkill. It would work great but just doesn’t make sense over other options when you factor in everything. Better off with a basic fan on the heat sink.
The radiator is more along the lines of what an OEM would do since there is nothing to fail and the cost and space requirements are very small.