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I'm way more civil than the previous snark deserves. Trying to be objective, too; I'm honest about the shortcomings of LED bulbs. They've reached the point where you can reasonably substitute, but it's no slam-dunk.
On a wall two feet away, dark spot. Out on the road, you barely notice it. Even with the dark spot, it's a better beam pattern than the halogen. Are HID better? I'll take your word for it. Are proper LED fixtures - or HID - a viable option for me and my $8,000 GL? No. For $40 a headlight pair, and my labor, I've got a huge improvement over halogen, and yes, I'm happy.
There are a lot of terrible LED retrofits out there. I think some manufacturers have it figured out, more or less, though.
The only reason I was less than civil with and about you is you were being glib with "HID is better, duh" and Snarkboy called you a manufacturer, which is silly. Just be realistic about the pros and cons. Peace.
The LED bulbs, with back cooling apparatus, fit in the fog light housing, but just barely. The cooling stuff on the back presses up against the housing. This blocks the airflow. Since there's nothing behind the housing, I figured, why not open it up with my trusty hole saw kit?
This is starting on the passenger side:
Have to scoot that metal clip down. Be careful, too, as there are air lines behind. After I went through, I figured out I should have been outboard more by about a half inch.
Similar on the driver side. That white stuff behind is the windshield washer reservoir. Curiously, it has a big void directly behind where the bulb goes.
Finished product ain't too shabby
The reflectors for the fog lights are a joke. They're lined with black inside, in the front. The now orange-looking marker lights need to go, too.
For what it's worth, with high beams on:
Last edited by eric_in_sd; May 20, 2017 at 03:09 PM.
I found that a slight mis-fit on the low beam H7 bulbs was tilting them out of alignment. I also removed excess aluminum from the tips of the bulbs. They come with a weird big round screw-in tip. I took this off and cut the rest off. The round dark spot was caused by a combination of the two. Here is the final product:
It's as good of a beam pattern as I've ever seen from halogen bulbs. Dunno how it compares to HID; the point is, there is nothing about the LEDs that prevents them from giving terrific light. The challenges are with physical installation.
I installed the LED 1056, soldering onto the bulb circuit board a 10 ohm, 50W resistor in parallel with the bulb. No CAN bus errors, and the bulb is way brighter than the original. Below is in daylight.
I did a similar parallel resistor trick to make the parking lights reasonable:
I bought the resistors on Ebay, shipped from China for $1 apiece. To calculate the needed resistor size, I measured the actual LED bulb current when the motor was running. I compared this to a regular bulb. The difference in current is what needs to be dissipated in the resistor. With the voltage and current, you know the needed resistor value. You also calculate the power, and get a wire-wound resistor that's rated for more power than this. Go up; the resistor prices are about the same for a 50W versus 25W. There's plenty of room on the rear taillight board, and it's nice to have the larger package to dissipate heat more effectively.
Note there are 1156 and 194 LED bulbs that claim to be CAN bus compatible. I don't know how they do this without having an external resistor. If they dissipate the extra power in the bulb, well, that bulb won't last very long.
Finally, I put foil tape inside the fog light housing, to cover the black. I'm disappointed in Hella for making such a weird housing. Anyway, it's at least somewhat better.
All in all, I'm very pleased with the results. I don't recommend this for anyone who isn't pretty comfortable with soldering, etc., and detailed mechanical work, but the lesson remains: LEDs work just fine, and the issues are with mechanical installation.
A forum sponsor who sells these said not to use in the low beams and I'm the tard? Good luck.
Dude, who cares what a forum sponsor says? They're in it for a buck, and I'm not. I'm not selling anything.
I've been running them for a while now, and they've been good. I fiddled with the setup, and they're great. What's your interest in telling me otherwise? Are you selling HID's? Or are you just feeling like a chump cos you spent $$$ on HID's, which are a dying technology? Sorry, bro, but that's water under the bridge. Get over it.
Think about what you said. A forum sponsor who makes money from selling the LED bulbs says not to do it and you question credibility. Who's the chump?
Look, I could care less what you do with your car but I do care that others should do more research before going down this road. Is it better than the factory halogens, maybe. The stock bulbs are horrible so it may be better but it is not optimum and requires a crap ton of effort to make it work in the stock housing.
Again, your car, do what you want and I applaud you for getting these to fit. It is no small feat as you have shown. LED lighting is advancing quickly and, some day, they may work as well or better than HID but they are not there yet.
You're clinging to reasonable explanations why they shouldn't work to support your belief.
The forum sponsor makes a whole lot more money selling HID's than LEDs. He has a good reason to care. But his responses on this thread are more reasonable than yours, and "shadenfroh" was a complete fool. I don't get it; you guys are like religious fanatics. You act like my putting LEDs in was like eating a BLT at a mosque.
There are plenty of crap LEDs out there, and even the good ones have problems, as I clearly demonstrated.
Now, if I were selling HID retrofits, I would take the good LED products out there, and figure out what it takes to make them a workable solution, and sell that. HID lighting is dead in the long run, for all applications, and may as well get ahead of the curve. But that's not my business.
I didn't want to get pulled back into a flamewar..... I've said my piece, but want to clarify one point as it pertains to our business model. Our margins are actually significantly higher with our headlight series LEDs than HIDs. This is because we control the total process with LEDs as that's our core business. With HIDs, we're simply distributors for Morimoto so have really small margins. We only chose to offer HIDs because our customers here were asking for a total lighting solution, so introduced HIDs to our product offering. We even went so far as to compare ~30 other HID manufacturer products before settling on Morimoto to carry as best of breed for technology, price, performance, and reliability. Truth be told, MTEC was the best, but their prices were not worth the marginal improvements over Morimoto.
I didn't want to get pulled back into a flamewar..... I've said my piece, but want to clarify one point as it pertains to our business model. Our margins are actually significantly higher with our headlight series LEDs than HIDs. This is because we control the total process with LEDs as that's our core business.
See, it's not hard to be reasonable. Kudos to you for the maturity.
I don't see a larger picture of your H7 LED, but I'm guessing it's a multi-diode array. I think the higher output diodes came along more recently than 2014. Now, it's not my business, but you might want to take another look at what's out there. With hemispherical lens single diodes, you should get a nearly perfect spherical light distribution.
I also wonder whether fan cooling would work better. I run the DRL option on my GL, so the low beams are on all the time, and I suspect passive (ribbon) cooling would not be sufficient in daytime, warm climate use. The fan noise is noticeable when the engine is stopped, so that's another reason not to go that route. They could build quieter fans; they just haven't tried.
I've gone 14k miles, probably around 350 hours on time. No failures.
I believe 6000K is best for nighttime vision, but if I could do it over again I'd put in 5000K. Not a lot of LED options out there, though. I think the manufacturers are catering to the HID substitute market.
Best of luck to y'all. I'm just throwing information out there.
Yes, we use CREE XBD hemispherical diode. Although fan cooling has better cooling performance, especially when idle, but it's not as reliable with all the dirt/dust/debris that can clog up the fan components. The sound is an issue, but it's the total failure of the fan component which really is the bigger issue. Spacing with the fan and not being able to seal the space is also an issue, allowing for dust/condensation to intrude into the housing and cause premature lens hazing. That's why we decided against active fan integration for less moving part ribbon passive cooling solution.
Yes, we use CREE XBD hemispherical diode. Although fan cooling has better cooling performance, especially when idle, but it's not as reliable with all the dirt/dust/debris that can clog up the fan components. The sound is an issue, but it's the total failure of the fan component which really is the bigger issue. Spacing with the fan and not being able to seal the space is also an issue, allowing for dust/condensation to intrude into the housing and cause premature lens hazing. That's why we decided against active fan integration for less moving part ribbon passive cooling solution.
Wait - and you're saying that the dispersion is not good?!? Something is wrong - my low beam pattern is excellent.
Think about what you said. A forum sponsor who makes money from selling the LED bulbs says not to do it and you question credibility. Who's the chump?
Look, I could care less what you do with your car but I do care that others should do more research before going down this road. Is it better than the factory halogens, maybe. The stock bulbs are horrible so it may be better but it is not optimum and requires a crap ton of effort to make it work in the stock housing.
Again, your car, do what you want and I applaud you for getting these to fit. It is no small feat as you have shown. LED lighting is advancing quickly and, some day, they may work as well or better than HID but they are not there yet.
I'm by no means an expert here. But from what I've been reading on headlights, LED technology has sided with actual laser headlights. I can't keep up with all this new stuff.
I've asked this several times.
Does ANYONE have any idea where I can find LED fog lamps with an actual LED housing to disperse the beam to a sharp cut off?
On the GL, if you want fog lamps with a sharp cutoff and LED, you will need to buy the projector fogs and do a retrofit as Eric did. I have them on my GL but with HID bulbs. The projectors fogs have a very nice cutoff. Just make sure to aim them properly.
No, the link to the fog lights I posted are not factory. I'm running the H7's in the headlights. The fog lights are 9006's and I used an HID bulb there too. The fogs I linked are projectors so the cutoff is nice. The light distribution is not as nice as the factory, not even close, but work fine for a driving light.
Does ANYONE have any idea where I can find LED fog lamps with an actual LED housing to disperse the beam to a sharp cut off?
If you don't mind enlightening (heh) me: What is the problem with the factory dispersion? It's a serious question because I don't know anything about proper fog lights. I'm using them a super low beam, throwing a ton of light in the near field. I want them only as auxiliary low beams for low speed off road.
It wouldn't be a very expensive experiment to put H11 LEDs in; you can probably get them in yellow. If you got the kind with passive cooling (a fat ribbon of copper or aluminum) you wouldn't have to drill holes in the back plastic like I did.
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