Park light to Running light

[JustBadly]

The standard side light on our Jag is a feeble effort given todays vehicles so I decided to increase the Lux by 'swapping' the 5 watt filament Bulb with an H3 led. What is good about the H3 is that it is the same width as the filament Bulb and will fit thru the mounting hole into the reflector. The H3 was pulled apart and the driver removed with a copper strip board soldered in place. This allows the H3 to plug in to the standard Bulb holder. The driver was soldered in line and connected to the loom with crimp connectors. It fills the reflector with light now but is not so bright to dazzle. The original bulb is approx 8 lumens, the H3, 20 lumens.

[mrmike]

I also did this but I did have a couple of problems,

1. The Led lamp fell into the reflector assy while I was messing about with it. Given the extra length, thinner contacts etc  it comes out of the holder more easily. I retrieved mine with a small neodym magnet on a bit of cord.  I was lucky because the LED lamp was magnetic.

2. When I went for the yearly test, They found one of the Leds had failed, I had to refit the normal Bulb. This did not show up as a lamp failure over the Canbus because of the internal resistor in the Led lamp! I have gone back to the original bulbs looks yukky but I will sell the car shortly anyway.

M

 

[LairdScooby]

17 hours ago, JustBadly said:

The standard side light on our Jag is a feeble effort given todays vehicles so I decided to increase the Lux by 'swapping' the 5 watt filament bulb with an H3 led.

Why didn't you just buy some CANBus compatible T10 LEDs?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/334567810243?var=543657059804

Before :

After :

Same bulbs work well on the number plate lights too :

Oh yeah, those are LED tail and stop/tail bulbs too. 😛

17 hours ago, JustBadly said:

The original bulb is approx 8 lumens, the H3, 20 lumens.

Don't know where you got your figures from but the standard 5W T10 Bulb (aka W5W) is ~90Lm, the H3 should be 1200-1600Lm to give similar output to the halogen version it replaces and the T10 LED i linked to is ~120-150Lm.

[mrmike]

The ones I fitted were canbus compatible! In fact they look like yours but are gold coloured. They worked fine until a month or so ago. In fact I still have one as a spare now.

Canbus compatible means that the system sees a certain load on the circuit, when a normal Bulb burns out etc the load is no longer there and a lamp failure is registered or shown. With Leds the current taken by the leds themselves is much lower than the incandecent bulbs. In order to trick the canbus system there are resistors in parallel with the Leds so that it appears like a normal incandescent Bulb. When one of the leds burns out, then the canbus system still sees the current being drawn by the parallel resistors and thinks that the Bulb is still OK but in reality there is no light only heat being dissipated by the resistors.

[LairdScooby]

The point i was making wasn't that they were CANBus compatible (that is just a bonus) but the fact they are T10 LEDs so are a direct replacement. Day Running Lights are much brighter, in the UK they are 200-800Lm in brightness so considerably brighter than the H3 bulbs you repurposed.

As for CANBus, i worked with the guy who developed/designed the I2C system which was the predecessor of the CANBus system as we now know it so i'm reasonably familiar with the workings of it - also the system will be looking for the resistance of a 5W Bulb, ~24 Ohms - an H3 will (or at least should) be ~2.6 Ohms so the H3 LEDs could present an unexpected load to the CANBus system.

[mrmike]

I did not use H3 bulbs! They are 50W jobbies, what would I do with 50W side lights if they were mountable?

What I used were T10  5W replacements at 5 Euros a piece, I will measure the R tomorrow.

As I said before they are very similar to yours but gold coloured with side moounted leds and front mounted leds with a lens. they were very bright and looked good.

The OEM bulbs look awful.

Btw I have the HID setup.

[JustBadly]

Lumen output was calibrated using wiki figures and configuring app. Don't believe 1600 lumens for a fog light, the brightest torches are 1800 and they can light up forest. The brake and indicator are canbus but the rest is not monitored on my 2004. I have bought several 'brighter' T10s only they are never that good, so I decided to repurpose the H3 but it still only draws 4.5 watts and won't blow a fuse. I've got led all round but had to rewire the tail lights since Jaguar have the negative swapped to positive. Same with the indicators.