Hi Everyone

Recently I thought of upgrading my car's lights by fitting Osram Night-breakers and changing the side light bulbs to their LED equivalent.

The Night-breakers are much more "whiter" than standard and look more in keeping with more modern cars but changing the side light bulbs was not as easy. Switch my lights on and the new LED much better than standard but turning them off well; they wouldn't turn off.

They remained slightly illuminated which totally confused me. Only a slight glow say, around 5% of their normal output but clearly this is not acceptable.

Can anyone throw some light on this (excuse the pun) ?

My theory is that LED take much less power to switch them on and there is obviously some residual power still in the cables: not enough to light incandescent bulbs but just enough to light LED's so, some sort of resistor would be required; that's my thought anyway

Any "sparks" out there?

Thanks guys

 

 

Very strange that Martyn. I recently upgraded my headlight bulbs on my 2003 x type to Phillips Diamond Vision and side lights to Phillips X-treme Vision led and they both work fine on mine . Maybe you could give Osram a quick e-mail to see if they can shed any light on it . Or if you bought them from a local autoparts shop maybe having a word with them . Let us know how you get on , i'm sure there will be a simple solution .

Regards .

Andy .

Hi Andy

You were right, there is a simple solution. The LED's that i was using were incompatible with with my car.

I need to obtain "Can bus Free" LED's as these have tiny resisters build in which, as I understand, is something to do with the bulb failure feature on my car.

Anyway, these are now on order.

(I spoke to a local car spark)

Hi Martin

I have this on mine and i quite like it

they do go off after about 15 mins, when the control unit cuts the 12v feed

its because they use a switched negative on all most every thing on the car, where the bulb is fed with a permanent 12v and the negative is switched via a control unit, there is a slight leakage as you say, that stays there to monitor the bulb, to see if its healthy or not

it will not do any harm, its something you don't see with a normal bulb as the resistance of a normal bulb is too low to make it glow, but the voltage is still there, but because the bulb now has a led bulb in it now, that slight voltage leakage makes it glow slightly, but like i said it does go off after about 10 to 15 mins

I'm sure the "can bus error free" will do the same, "can bus error free" bulbs have a tiny chip in them that talk to the cars ecu that tell the car the bulb is healthy, our car bulb are not can bus type bulbs

have a look here https://www.superbrightleds.com/blog/can-bus-led-bulbs/293/

cheers

Joe

I fitted "Can-Bus" free led side light bulbs and whilst they did switch on / off as "normal" they did get extremely hot and one failed within a matter of hours. Currently trying a different make but those are also getting very hot and not what I would expect from LED's.