ijeeep

LED light freaks and geeks, your experience please.

I wouldn't mind trying LEDs in the dash and dome lights IF..they dim down smooth and continuous the exact same as incandescent bulbs. LED instrument lights sucked at the dimming thing. They were bright, a little less bright and then fell to off in a quarter turn of the dimmer switch. Are they still like that or have things changed ?

Brake & Tail lights. All the LED B & T lights I'm seeing are noticeably redder and brighter than incandescent bulbs in tail light mode but the brightness difference between tail and brake is not so hot. It's less eye catching than regular bulbs. What are you using that has a difference between T & B at least as much as the old school bulbs ?

Color temperature. I don't want 6k in my dome or dash lights. That tends to bleach the rhodopsin out of the retinas.

Your thoughts ?

Cummins93

I used cheap no name bulbs for my 04 neon and 96 cherokee. The neon dims then fine the Cherokee has very little adjustment. It's not just the bulbs that have an issue.

tech

If you put LED lights in the rear put red ones for red lights amber ones for amber lights and for the dash you can put any color bulb in if you want to change the color of your dash lights . if you want the same color light you have now get a 5k or sometimes they call that color soft light

dave1123

Be careful changing the color of your dash lights. LEDs emit light on a single wavelength. I put green LEDs in my WJ's dash and my red needles disappeared! The red numbers for metric also disappeared or turned mud brown. Use soft white bulbs and they should be okay, but they won't totally go out, but are very dim. I used 550 lumen bulbs in my reverse lights and they are eye searing but you can't find red bulbs with that output, at least I couldn't. I've only bought them from superbrightleds.com.

I didn't mess with the turn signals because of the resistance problem with the flasher, but they are bright enough as is.

4x4jeepmanthing

i just did this recently, but in a few stages. First I replaced my shifters with sylvania LED, these would dim all the way to off just as the stock did. Then I did the domes,floors with Red,and dash with Blue. After adding these gauges lights Ide say they dim half the brightness of 100% on to 50% and its kinda a bummer to not be able to dim them further for mountains at night and such.
I put blue lights in the dash and other than the very center light, these are great, the center needs a 360 degree oriented light to illuminate better. All this color didnt wash out anything and the needles are a more glow in the dark orange look now, kinda neat.

I havent touched the tail lights yet but I thought I remember reading a suggestion once, it said not to use LEDs for the exterior signal lights as they didnt disperse the light as well? IIRC, meh food for thought.

ijeeep

Thanks guys.
Where I'm at now: I tried a blue bulb cover on the HighBeam Indicator. That did a little but not much. Then I took that off and colored the bulb with a blue sharpie marker. WAY less glaring at night. Maybe Sharpie ink filters out some other frequency light, who knows ?

Next I'm looking at these festoon LED dome light bulbs from Superbrightleds.com in 3K color.

They should run a lot cooler when I leave the doors open for hours on end.

Jeepmanthing, thanks for doing the leg work on the Sylvanias. I'm going to pick up a couple and try them.

tech

3K light bulb will put out a amber color light , 5 k or 4k will put a soft white light .

IJM

I used the same festoon LEDs in 3,000K from superbrightleds.com a few years back when I redid my interior lights in LED. Like you, I wanted something that was similar in color temp to the original incandescent to give it a nice and warm look (4,000K+ looks garish to me), but with a little more light and way longer battery life. I ended up taking two of those festoon lights, popping off the covers, and soldering the end terminals together at a very wide V angle to bump up the light output and make it shine over a wider angle. I used this setup both for the main overhead light as well as the under-hood light. The map lights and hatch area light were also replaced, same with the footwell. No pics, but it looks great and can be left on for days without killing my battery. Lots more light in the engine bay and inside the passenger compartment as well

While I was at it, I also replaced my reverse lights with LEDs at 2,900K. Again, I was looking for something that put out more light but looked period correct, if you will. I don't remember the exact bulb that's in there, but I used their bulb finder. I didn't touch any of the dash lights, as that seemed pointless. Running, turn, and brake lights are all standard incandescent.

Update: Here are some pics to show the color temp I used.

IJM

3,000K is "whiter" than the standard incandescent (non-halogen) bulbs used everywhere except the headlights. I wouldn't call it amber, as that's more like 2,200K or below.