Are the LED replacements for normal halogen bulbs any good? Anyone used them? Like these ones - Listing #: 918513430
wind.turbine,
Jul 17, 8:45am
are they even legal?
peja,
Jul 17, 8:49am
That was the first thing that crossed my mind. I was looking at getting some of these for my Falcon, ednded up replacing car for unrelated reasons. I like the idea, would be a great upgrade for an older car with so-so headlights, just want to be sure of the legality of it
petal_91,
Jul 17, 8:51am
There is no way those particular LED bulbs would be any good for your main headlight beams. LEDs that are bright enough for main beams have large heatsinks or sometimes even fans attached to them.
They'd be OK for city lights or fogs though. Probably technically not legal there, but no one is going to notice them.
sr2,
Jul 17, 8:51am
LOL; " The bulbs DO NOT include built-in resistors offering the latest error-free canbus technology. "
(I think he meant to say "cannabis" technology!)
rpvr,
Jul 17, 9:50am
I don't understand about the heatsink etc, I thought the idea of LEDs is to provide high output illumination at much lower wattage than other types of bulbs.
pandai,
Jul 17, 10:14am
They get really hot and cook themselves.
I wouldn't bother, I have my doubts about the beam pattern (and brightness) you'd get from LED replacement lamps anyway.
smalltrader2,
Jul 17, 10:16am
LED is very efficient in terms of "watt per lumen". However, they do run hot. If you are familiar with household LED down light, you can see that they all come with substantial heatsink despite only running at 7 - 10 watts. LED without heatsink will have a very short life.
LED used for ambient lighting is quite different to the very low wattage LED which used for as indicator signal on motherboard/circuit boards. The ambient/lighting LED runs hot despite having much lower wattage than comparable Halogen bulb.
vivac,
Jul 17, 6:24pm
Avoid that junk. You need to look at the Lumen output, those will be around 4-500 at best, normal headlights are around 1500. Anything worth buying will have a separate driver and a fan on the back of the actual unit.
gsimpson,
Jul 17, 6:39pm
One can get H4 "dual filament" LED bulbs. I use them in my 1946 Austin and they use half the power of the original bulbs with twice the light output.
m16d,
Jul 17, 6:43pm
Well these "bulbs" don't actually produce a lot of heat. and another thing they don't do is use a lot of power. We use them as feature lighting in our fruit tree orchard powered by 12V phone chargers. But for car headlights, I wouldn't think they'd be much good.
gsimpson,
Jul 17, 7:03pm
Less power use is an advantage. More light output than the equivalent halogen of a given Wattage is also an advantage.
wind.turbine,
Jul 17, 7:08pm
The LED its self creates very little heat if any at all. the step down transformer is the part that creates all the heat which if not cooled will have a short live span
As most LEDs only use between 1-2V there will always be a need for a transformer or resistor and that is always going to produce heat as a bi-product.
Also due to how small wattage is required to run an LED, running them in series will make no difference as the voltage drop across and LED is extremely low, so you would still have close the the full 13V running through the whole string of LEDs which would of course burn them all as soon as to turned them on.
I would have to wonder how long that particular unit would last with it not having a fan to cool its self
clark20,
Jul 17, 7:29pm
No, whites LEDs require around 3V, so a string of 3 , a small resister and a diode gets you to 12V no problem. Yes, LED DO produce heat , but have much higher efficacy (look it up) than bulbs, about 80 lm/watt in these devices instead of 25-30lm/watt for a halogen.
Edit, and you are correct they do not have any compliance for car replacement bulbs, complete approved units are OK (the new Pruis and BMW/audis have them)
wind.turbine,
Jul 17, 8:04pm
yea your not wrong, they to create heat but differently not as significant as a bulb, but in the case of an LED set up if it has a resister then that is where the heat will be produced and become the problem.
went and had a look and seems about 3.4V for white so must have mixed it up with another colour.
strobo,
Jul 17, 8:42pm
$6 each @ sca H4 Quartz halogen bulbs are more than sufficient ! why waste money .
dave653,
Jul 18, 3:25pm
Don't bother! I tried them. buggerall output!
gsimpson,
Jul 19, 7:22am
It obviously depends on the vehicle. However in my case converting to LED throughout the car dropped the electrical load from close to 20A (the limit of the generator) to 4A. Not only that but the light output is significantly more than the original (non halogen bulbs). Fitting halogen would have made the situation worse as this would have increased the electrical load.
lookoutas,
Jul 19, 8:02am
Do those phone chargers get hot/very warm?
aredwood,
Jul 19, 10:41pm
The problem with LEDs is that they don't scale very well to higher outputs. As you end up with alot of heat being produced by something that is really small. So the heatsink often ends up being the biggest part of the LED lamp assembly.
And when you are running high output LEDs, They need to be supplied from a constant current power supply / driver. Not a constant voltage one or via a resistor. This is because the voltage drop across an LED goes down when the temp increases. So if you try to run off constant voltage or a resistor. LED gets hotter, Less voltage drop means more current, Which means more heat, Which means more current. You can see what is going to happen. Bye Bye LED.
smalltrader2,
Jul 20, 3:14pm
Retrofitting LED in to existing sockets for cars is probably not a viable proposition. However, custom design LED headlight and LED interior lighting in cars are starting to show up in higher end European and Japanese cars.
Even the Honda Jazz now has LED headlight as it is supposed to be a cheap and cheerful car. Custom design automobile LED lighting does work well.
I am using LED bulbs in my 1946 Austin. A big improvement over OE bulbs.
strobo,
Jul 21, 3:39am
Achieving ends to a no end , some may be required to fit resistors inline to rate or comply , for example head light illumination legal limits or indicator flash rate , fitting resistors will nominally increase load .The lighting system is rated for a reason. the over powering blinding headlight needs capped.Light emitting diodes are a situation of being seen rather than seeing ! Have another look at it !
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