GEO LED Headlights Wiring Conversion

[MPGeo]

If you own a GEO, and thinking about doing an L.E.D. headlight conversion...
THIS IS FOR YOU!!!!

L.E.D. 4x6's are NOT Plug-N-Play for these GEO cars.

WIRING MODIFICATIONS NECESSARY... HERE'S MY HOW-T0

So I recently purchased a pair of LED 4x6 headlights and had to find few things the hard way... and I want to share them with you.

Yes the harness needs to be modified, but that's not the problem.

As it turns out L.E.D.s are polarity specific. Meaning, that your ground and battery supplies HAVE TO be on the correct location. Reversing the wiring will simply not allow the light to come on...

In turn old-style incandescent bulbs don't care how they are wired, as long as they have a ground and a battery supply, they will come on.

Simple enough... Until you start wiring your new harness in and find out things are not working quite right


As it turns out, the headlight wiring harness on this car uses a dedicated battery supply that is constant, and the headlight switch internal relays provide the ground to either the Lo/Hi sides to complete the circuit. Since the incandescent bulbs are not polarity specific this works great.

Most other manufacturers would have used a constant ground, and have supplied the battery supply for either Lo/Hi to complete the circuit. Since the L.E.D. headlamps are universal, they assume your vehicle is wired this way. I guess this was supposed to be the wiring norm of the day?

Therein lies the problem:
Metro = 2 switchable Grounds & 1 Positive constant supply
LED = 1 Ground constant & 2 switchable Positive supply

What this means is that you can only have either Low Beams or High Beams, but not both! Since I had to go to work early the next morning I opted for Low Beams

So the next morning during my work break I was brainstorming how to make this circuit work for both Lo/Hi beams and the obvious solution was to add some extra realys... but I did not want to run a bunch of new wiring so I wanted the relays to be close by the headlights. This meant I might have to buy four relays, 2 per headlight (1Hi/1Lo)... that's over $40 in relays, I only paid $55 for the lights... So I figured a way to make the circuit work with only one relay per side.

This is a "cleaned-up" version of the schematics


So I built the circuit and tested it on this here prototype & it worked...


It's actually not that hard, once you figure it all out, and this is what mine looks like




The constant power supply from the OEM harness will be connected to (3) three locations (where the yellow cable is) This supplies the power to the relay terminal #30, and also supplies power to either realy terminal #85 or #86 (to energize relay). The OEM power supply also has to provide power to the Low Beam positive head lamp terminal.

The OEM ground supplied for the LO beam still goes connected to Ground on the LED harness.

The OEM ground supplied for the Hi Beam goes connected to the other terminal... either realy terminal #85 or #86 (to energize relay) (which ever was not used by the OEM power supply)

A diode has to be bridged between the LO ground & Hi Ground as shown... This is the key to the whole thing. I used a 3 amp diode on mine. If you install the diode the wrong way then you will simply have Hi beams for both Lo or Hi settings. When you have it the correct way your Lo ground will not energize the relay, and the Hi ground will energize the relay.

The Hi Beam on the Head Lamp connector has to be connected to the Relay terminal #87 so that when your Hi beam ground energizes your relay it then closes the circuit for the Hi-beams and supplies it with a battery supply rather than a ground.

This is how it looks on my car




So far it is working great, and as expected, I'll see how long the 3amp diode holds on, I might upgrade to a 5amp diode and that will be plenty!

I purchased the wire terminals strip section from Lowes Home Improvement, it was a 12 terminal strip and I cut it into 3 four terminal segments and using only one 4 terminal segment per side as pictured.

HOPE THIS WAS HELPFUL

Low Beams Shown Here

[oil pan 4]

I put those 4x6 lights on my suburban.
I tried to use them as low beam and high beam but they really sucked, they had very bad glare in low beam.
So I converted them to run high beam only since the suburban uses four of those 4x6 lights, 2 of them being high beam only.

[markweatherill]

So what is the beam pattern like? Those units look like floodlights!
Can you see further with them, is the question...

[oil pan 4]

The beam pattern was actually a pretty good spot light.
Only pRobles was there wasn't really any kind of beam termination line like you get with stock or actual dot allover lights.
See:
http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...651-32640.html

[MPGeo]

Originally Posted by markweatherill

So what is the beam pattern like? Those units look like floodlights!
Can you see further with them, is the question...

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

I put those 4x6 lights on my suburban.
I tried to use them as low beam and high beam but they really sucked, they had very bad glare in low beam.
So I converted them to run high beam only since the suburban uses four of those 4x6 lights, 2 of them being high beam only.

So my personal experience has been overall a very positive one. I haven't experienced any low beam glare, and my visibility has increased drastically.
I would definitely recommend them and won't go back to halogen.

I can see further and clearer w/ LEDs on Lo setting than I could with the aftermarket ones I had on Hi setting... I don't even have a need for Hi beams to be honest, but I wanted to make them fully functional.

The one other big thing for me, has been that apparently the color spectrum of these LEDs makes all the reflective road sign become more vibrant, if that's a thing. It makes their colors just stand out, even when theirs a car besides me, my light spectrum outshines theirs when it comes to road sign reflectivity...

Besides that the other main item to consider, or at least for me, is the huge reduction in power consumption. So in LOW setting they only consume 18w per light, and 45w on HI. I plan to do an alternator delete in the future, so load reduction is definitely a must for me as well, and these LED lights help me drive my electrical consumption down while delivering great visibility.

[order99]

(applause!)

(scribbles notes and copies photos)

Might be time to try this in my 1993 Festiva...