Driving lights wiring
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bods
Member
Same wiring will work fine
Sent from my Lenovo TB3-710F using Tapatalk
Sent from my Lenovo TB3-710F using Tapatalk
Because LED lights will use less power (amps) than the originals you'll be fine.
If you were going the other way - changing from LED to halogen/HID - you might need to change the power cables over to something heavier.
If you were going the other way - changing from LED to halogen/HID - you might need to change the power cables over to something heavier.
bods
Member
I'd agree going from hid to halogen possibly needing more substantial wiring, but some of these led spotlights draw a damn lot of power. That's a common trap, LEDs on their own draw very little, but throw 50 or so of them, especially some of these newer 10w ones and the power draw gets up there. Moreso with the cheap, inefficient Chinese ones... The light bar on my roof draws around 20a, which I have on a 60a relay and 30a fuse with apparently 50a rated twin core (personally I'd only be happy with 25a max constant draw through it). In comparison I have 4 x 50w hids on the bullbar with 1 x 40a relay with from memory a 15a fuse for the lot and just 6mm twin core wiring to them.... Food to thought...
The light bars and led spotties are great for spread and if you don't want to wait for the warm up time of the hids. But they have nothing on the distance that the hids have.
An exceptionally good point and I shouldn't just draw on my own experiences, should I?
I added a light bar to my car - something like 10K lumens for a single row of 10 CREE units @ 10W each - so 120W. I left my 2 100W halogens though, because I wasn't sure if the light bar was going to be good enough and I'm glad I did. I have since upgraded the bulbs to 130W and use the halogens in fog - because the light is much more focussed, it cuts through the fog better than the light bar which turns fog into a sheet of white paper.
The bike's a different story. It has a pair of 60/55W halogen headlight globes to which I added a pair of 15W U8 LED spots (supposedly 3000 lumens each). While these spots are extremely small and bright, they don't give me enough light for the country roads I ride on at night (and am about to, and it's just 1.8C outside). I am going to add a pair of 40W LED lightbars (I have them on the roof of my Navara now, but they're not needed) and see how that goes. Power isn't a worry, the Goldwing has a 60A alternator and I can upgrade it to 90A. The 73kW (100hp) engine of the bike won't have any issue with it.
The trouble with some of the new light bars is they draw stupidly large amounts of power. A search on eBay had this unit as its second entry. 1480W of light bar that belongs on a roof? Pardon? That means a cable length of 7m or so, holding 1480/12 = 123 amps! The average car on the road doesn't even have an alternator that can supply this at full engine rpm, let alone run any of the other gear!
And worse - 123A of power needs at least 4Ga cabling to supply the power without heating the cable (which causes voltage drop, additional current draw, additional heating and then a fire).
So the point is that you are absolutely correct: we should never fall into a trap of simply upgrading because LEDs use less than halogens - it's not always true!
