New CR-V AWD mods

[Ecky]

^ It doesn't help that the heat sink is entirely inside the housing. Most units I've seen have at least some braided metal strap that hangs out the back.

From your picture, the beam pattern does look really good though.

[serialk11r]

Originally Posted by Ecky

^ It doesn't help that the heat sink is entirely inside the housing. Most units I've seen have at least some braided metal strap that hangs out the back.

Inside the housing was intended. The engine bay gets SUPER hot (exhaust is at the front of the engine), also the windshield wiper bottle is very close to the passenger side light.

[serialk11r]

Well, this sucks. I had some light ceramic film applied to the windshield, and now I don't think I can see well enough at night anymore. I put the halogens back on and noticed I could see a bit better, but all the cars driving by me seemed to have much brighter headlights :/ Damnit Honda.

I let the engine bay heat soak a bit and went around touching bits of metal (not the turbocharger though :P), and then I touched the LED heatsink. Whoa. That LED is HOT, maybe even over 80C (I can't touch it for even half a second). So maybe the engine bay air is ok for cooling a beefier LED.

Since the fitment is pretty tight, I'm buying some "Carlitek" bulbs with big heatsinks and a cable connector so I can plug it in first and then maneuver it into the housing hopefully without too much trouble.

As a summary of my experience with LED retrofits and watching reviews on Youtube of other lights, I would say even with a good beam pattern you still want increased light output compared to halogen to get better long distance vision, and more heatsink is better because hotter LEDs produce less light. 25w with a big heatsink is probably a good 55W halogen replacement.

[serialk11r]

I dug through my car parts box and found the old Scion FR-S LEDs, and I noticed they were H11 as well, so I tossed them on just to try...and immediately took them off because I couldn't see s*** past maybe 20 feet.

I just got the new LEDs in the mail and...turns out they sent me the "COB" style ones with a crappier beam pattern, though a little better than the single round emitter on the old lights. Oops.

Good news is, with a 4300K color temp (more yellow light) and higher power, these are actually usable. The halogen hot spot is maybe barely brighter than the general flooded center of the LED, maybe not, I couldn't really tell testing back to back. With the reflector housing there's a clean cutoff and the amount of light being thrown to the sides is not really much different.

Downside is the cooling fans are audible when you're at a stop, but with the fan or engine on or any road noise at all they're drowned out.

I've driven the car 2000 miles now, and took one trip at 70-75mph instead of 60-65mph. Wow, the aero really matters, because I went down from 40 to 32 mpg! The bright side seems to be that giving the car to my family members to drive (who have no clue about saving fuel), they seem to get 32mpg too.