LED Headlights from Xenon Depot - has anyone here tried these?

[deejaaa]

Originally Posted by com3

hehe. no argument here. i couldn't really care less if someone disagrees with me. i'm just sharing my real world experience, as LIGHT is something i care about, giving how much night driving i do.

i just turned over 300,000 miles in my element (in 6 years)....again, most of which was driven at night (i'm a motorcycle photographer for a living, and i travel all over the country to different race tracks).

i'm always on the quest for the best lighting solutions i can find that's still legal. though, i'm about to put a 50" lightbar on my tacoma... hehe.

i'm not talking about you.

Originally Posted by AlaricD

You don't have to be one.

That doesn't qualify you to make objective statements of the performance of the lights. The people qualified to make those statements use photometric testing, which is based on science and data.


LOL! And people think using these things is a good idea when they have to cobble together something like this?

If that's not a clear indication that these are absolute junk, I'm not sure what is.

What's next, a topic on how to staple a horse to the side of your car for extra hill-climbing power?

can you please stop with these statements? this is a good site to visit without the harsh tone in your words. these aren't the only ones you've made.

[leonardo-br]

i think in city driving , the propuse off car light is more for signals than ilumination
because the city is already good iluminated.
most of time i even do not notice diference when the headlights are off or on.

so, using led lights reduce the wattage comsumption of the ligth system and even if the ligths are a little weaker they are absolutely ok for use and it is very viable.

i purchased on ebay a lot of leds to replace all lights in the car , headlights brakes rear etc and by changing them to leds its almost 300-400 w less charge on the system ,so its almost a half horsepower (0,5 hp) that is gained for more in the car operation and it sure will have some economy in gas mileage.
and i even noticed that the prices on ebay is almost the same off normal lights on phisic stores.

some links of lamps that i bought

well ,i'm new here and cant post links yet

[MetroMPG]

Please keep the discussion civil here. Thanks.

Originally Posted by leonardo-br

some links of lamps that i bought

well ,i'm new here and cant post links yet

You can post the link without 'http' in it.

[freebeard]

Now that's a headlight!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AR2XHtrTyw

The whole thing is a heatsink and the beam pattern is awesome.

So...$700 a pair?

[oil pan 4]

Originally Posted by AlaricD

The "shine on the wall" method is good for a "rough in", but that's about it.

That's all I did and mine are far better than a lot of what I see on the road driving at me after dark.
Virtually no one does this. Most people just install cheap junk turn them on after dark and just drive around blinding everyone because they simply don't care.

[deejaaa]

that Evo II is killer. wow.

[brucepick]

Originally Posted by meelis11

brucepick - here is one idea. Why not use voltage booster circuit instead of 1.2V D-cell pack?
AutoSpeed - Voltage Booster, Mark II

Just buy one voltage step-up converter per-headlight (so you dont stress 150W max circuit too much - probably can stay with passive cooling that way too), tune your voltage to 14V and you dont have to deal with Nimh booster pack anymore.

Thanks, meelis11.

I think that currently, that solution is well worth considering.

I looked at DC-DC converters similar to the one you linked to, but at the time that I built the booster pack - summer 2014 - the voltage converters I found were limited to 10A capacity. LED headlights weren't really feasible yet either, so I would have needed approx 20A capacity just to handle high+low beams plus smaller bulbs. And that would have left the fans running on puny 12V, which is tolerable but not ideal.

So I built the 1.2V booster pack in summer 2014 and it served me well that winter. Winter requires far more headlight use, and not just as DRLs so I can be seen. I need to see the road ahead in the dark.

The 8 D-cells are rated 10AH each, and I'm confident they can safely be discharged at 2C rate. That's 20A each, or 160A combined as they are in parallel. I won't exceed that, and could probably run the starter motor from the boosted deep cycle batteries info need to!

My pack supports everything running off the lead acid deep cycles - lights and fans + wipers. If I were to switch to a DC-DC converter instead, I'd need several to properly support all those circuits. And I would not need to recharge the NiMH pack.

Down side:
Likely approx 90-92% efficiency of the converter. That would come into play on days when I use more than 40% of my battery capacity, driving usage past 50% which tends to reduce the life of the lead acid batteries.

[brucepick]

Lots of discussion recently in this thread regarding beam pattern, aim and their effect on brightness. I'll add some points from my experience.

1)
The o-ring gaskets supplied with my LED "bulbs" were too thick. Reviews of those bulbs by other users alerted me to that possibility. Local hardware store to the rescue.

With too-thick o-rings, the bulbs did not go fully into the headlight housings. Result: poor brightness and ho-hum alignment. Which actually was off.

2)
Once properly installed I needed to adjust the aim. Please see my photo on first page of this thread for the result.

Actual beam pattern is a rectangle, not the horizontal line type thing from a typical halogen. I adjusted so that the TOP of rectangle now stays at the same level as I back the car away from the wall. That is key. This way, at any distance, the "cutoff" stays at headlight height and does not move upwards as distance increases.

3)
I agree with sendler (Scott) in that while the LED emitters are not identical in shape to the filaments of halogens, they have gotten small enough so their effect approximates that of halogens. They will only improve as they get smaller in time.

4)
My car uses separate bulbs and housings for high and low beams. This makes it easier to optimize the bulb design for its job. I expect cars with a single dual-purpose bulb on each side may get worse results from LED conversions than I did. But if that's true, results will improve in time, as emitters get smaller.

[iamnotahippee]

LED Driving Lights
What about just wiring something like this up, and not use the factory housings? It is perfectly legal. Just check your local laws on lighting (mainly placement on the vehicle). You could put these on the vehicle and just turn on the oem park lights and wire these seperately.

[sendler]

It doesn't mention a power, lens angle, or show a beam shot of the pattern.