LED Headlight bulbs

Anyone in here retrofit their headlight bulbs to LEDs? How is the light output, beam pattern. Brighter than halogen? Where did you buy and how many lumens? What color temperature? Pictures?

 

Check out zoom-zoom and his threads. He did the conversion and did a great write-up to go with it. In a nut shell, he is totally impressed with them. He also supplied pbotos.

 

I put a Cyclops Motorsports 3800 lumen H4 bulb in the front of my VTR1000. Much, much brighter than a halogen! This one has a very decent pattern, there's a bit of light spill upwards on dip but no oncoming traffic has flashed me yet to complain. The bike also passed our local mandatory 6-monthly road worthiness check which includes examining the light and pattern.

 

I have the earlier gen 25watt Cree LED setup with the ballast and they aren't too good, they are in between a halogen and a basic 35watt hid however the light range it throws out is definitely on the short side.

 

NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

If you're talking about the LED kits that drop in a halogen spot (H4 for example), run for the hills. This was a failed experiment on my part. There just simply isn't enough heat sinking, even with those stupid fan ends poking out the back of the headlight assembly. The LED will eventually roast and split. I burned through a few of those kits that cycle gear sells before switching back to halogens. They failed on both the bike and the cage, so it wasn't a Honda R/R issue.

If you want more light you're better off spending the money to mount some sort of aux driving lamps. LED offerings from http://www.rigidindustries.com/ for example are excellent, and will be brighter and less $$ than the supposed "motorcyle aux lights". Heat sinking isn't an issue as it's taken into account with the design, and the reflector will actually be designed for the LED.

 

these are cheap and work well

 

Sorry you are having difficulties with yours. I was just going over zoom-zooms thread again and though he is not having problems with his, someone else there is.

Similarily to a point, all Canadian vehicles have had to have daytime running lights ever since somewhere around 1990 or so. At first, they just wired the low beam headlamps to come on with the ignition but now there is a separate light. (I think they should go back. Worked for years when we did this manually.) But on point. GM has a hot burning light in their DTRL for their trucks in the 2003 vintage. This turned the lenses on the truck cloudy. SO I switched to an LED bulb for mine. That was4 or 5 years ago and I have had no problem at all with those. There is no fan with them. Probably to bright enough for that. But a friend with a slightly newer Chevy truck basically the same vehicle, did the same. Same bulbs from same supplier. He had problems a few times with diodes burning out or not working. Go figure.

Come to think of it, on my bike, after replacing rear tail/brake light bulbs a few times in a short period of time, then getting pulled over at 03:00 on the freeway with no rear lighting, I switched to LED to the rear. Just two bulbs plug and play. That was somewhere around 2008. Have never replaced that light and it is still burning fine.

 

There are quite a few options out there as far as retro-fit LED headlights and a quick search on Google should produce numerous examples. As Randy mentioned, I did a write up with photos of the installation and all the plug and play kits are exactly that and install is easy as pie and fully reversible should you choose to go back to traditional bulbs.

I must freely offer up that there were 5 and 10 individuals, that I know of any how, who posted back on my original install thread about having issues with bulb, bulb power supply drivers, and cooling fan failures. Personally, I did finally suffer a cooling fan failure (cheap computer fans that are not really up to the task I think) and this led to a bulb failure. I have since switched to a kit from www.lifetimeledlights.com and their beam spread, coverage and overall light output are far better than the stock headlights IMHO, and I am more than happy with the results. As far as cost goes, the kit I originally installed was barely more (Canadian dollars) than a traditional set of bulbs so again, IMHO the upgrade was worth the few extra dollars.

The Lifetime Kit I installed the second time around had an LED emitter on both sides of the bulb and I'm not sure if they still make them the same way or not. Seems they now make one with the LED's on one side only and vary the brightness to control the high/low output. Personally, I would stay away from the LED bulb styles that look like the ones I originally installed as they do seem prone to failure. Considering how quickly technology changes in the world of electronics I can only assume that since I did my original thread on the LED headlights, the technology must have advanced and likely the issue with the heat dissipation of the LED's has changed, but I'm not an electronics engineer though.

One comment that came up a few times in the thread, both here and on VFRD, is that since the LED bulbs draw considerably less current from the bikes electrical system the R/R will have to dissipate the extra current as heat and possibly hasten the demise of the R/R should it be weak. I upgraded my bike with a series style R/R from Compu-Fire and have not experienced any issues with the charging system, but I feel I should mention the possiblity so that you are at least better informed and don't have to read through the whole thread.

http://vfrworld.com/forums/showthread.php/44225-LED-Headlight-Install-5th-Gen?highlight=

Here is a link to the original thread so that at least you can see in the first what the light output looks like. Hope this helps.

 

The cycle gear kits vs the lifetime kits are identical. At least they look completely the same, they're probably coming from the same place in China. Those are the ones I had that failed. How many miles have you logged on that set? I put on a few thousand miles that summer when I was messing with these, so the bulbs saw quite a decent burn time.

I drove the cage across country, and one started failing right when I got to the east coast. They were installed for a while before that, but that was 2800 plus whatever mileage before the trip. Maybe 5000?

 

I'm going to guess I've got about 5000 km's (3000 miles) on the Lifetime bulbs and I got about 8000 km's out of the original kit. The Lifetime bulbs seem to be holding out better as the fans seem to do a better job of cooling than the screw on ones from the original kit. Not sure if the fact that I clean the bike every time I ride it makes a difference and I use an air blower to spray water out of the cooling fans whenever I wash it. If a lot of dust and dirt were to get into the cooling fan enclosure on the Lifetime kit I can see there possibly being an issue with failure. I tried a test with the remaining bulb from my original kit where I ran the bulb like Lifetime showed with the bulb and cooling fan in water and although the bulb stayed lit the cooling fan did NOT. I think the mere airflow across the fans in behind the fairing may have been enough to stop the cooling fan thus calling failure of the bulb.