Episode: 2214
Title: HPR2214: Upgrading Vehicle Lights From Halogen to LED
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2214/hpr2214.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 15:48:44

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This is HPR episode 2,214 entitled, A Braiding Vehicle Lights From Harajantoyle D.
It is hosted by John Culp and is about 18 minutes long and can rim a clean flag.
The summary is, a quick show about upgrading some of the lights on our vehicles from Harajantoyle D.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15.
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Hey everybody, this is John Culp and Lafayette at Louisiana and I'm recording another
in my series of episodes about my truck, although what I'm going to be walking you through
today is actually on our Honda, my pickup truck is the one I keep doing all these
episodes on because it's 11, 12 years old and stuff has been breaking on it.
We've got a much newer car, the Honda CR-V and I'm going to be doing a little upgrade on that
that's like what I've done on nearly every available possibility on my truck.
What I'm talking about is upgrading the lights from halogen to LED.
It's all started maybe a month ago, a little, maybe six weeks ago.
I'm not sure but my wife came in and said, you know, our neighbor across the street said that your
tail light is out on your truck and so I went and checked it out and it turned out not to be the
tail light but the reverse light. Now those white lights that come on when you put the car into
reverse, one of those was out and so I disassembled the tail light assembly and took out the bulb and
then took it with me over to AutoZone to try and just replace it but when I was looking at the
replacement bulbs, I found the one that would be an exact replacement as a halogen but right next
to it were all these LEDs and it never even occurred to me to think about it but I realized that I
could replace the halogen with an LED which would be a little more efficient in terms of energy.
It's not like it matters all that much in a car I guess but it might depend on
your car's electrical system how much it matters but also normally the LEDs are brighter and so
that's always a nice safety upgrade. So anyway, I bought a pair of these white LED
for my reverse lights and installed them and they work great they're brighter and they work
perfectly so then I started looking at upgrading the other lights in the truck including the
what do they call those the marker lights on the front left side of the truck I've got I'm
gonna have pictures in the show notes of this I've taken a few pictures where if you look inside
the light fixtures on the truck you can see that it's an LED bulb instead of a halogen but these are
kind of yellow on the they've at least got an orange plastic covering I think the lights
themselves are just white if you have them shining without any yellow covering over them
and it turns out that about half a dozen places on my truck took the same bulb hang on
there's a phone call I don't recognize that number so I'm gonna send it to voicemail
so the they're about half a dozen places on my truck that take the same small LED bulb and so
I ordered maybe eight of them and replaced the two marker lights on the front the two lights
that light up the license plate in the back the upper mount reverse light on that that's kind of
like on the top of the truck on the back and then also the interior dome light which is it's
great because that one is noticeably brighter every time I open the door now I can see a lot better
because the the light is brighter and then on the Honda I upgraded the LED from a halogen to LED
on those interior lights as well the two map lights in the front and then the dome light in the center
funny thing I accidentally ordered a kind of pinkish purple colored LED I didn't paint the
attention to what color it was I just assumed it would be white but it ended up being kind of
pinkish purple and I installed that in the dome light and my daughter loves it so if we're
for out and about at night and as soon as I hit the little key fob to unlock the doors the car
starts glowing this pink inside and my daughter really likes that I wasn't so crazy about it for
the map lights so I ordered some more bulbs in white and those are nice now they're nice and
bright white good for if you have to read a map or I mean these days I guess people just use
GPS's but anyway the interior lights are upgraded and on the back of the car this one so far
have only upgraded what they call the parking lights but I have now a new set of LED bulbs that
are going to be the brake lights these are supposed to glow red and I've not tried them out yet
but I'm going to walk through the process of installing these things on the Honda now one thing
I've not done yet is upgraded the the main headlights on the truck those are much more expensive each
of these other bulbs like the small ones of which they're about a half dozen of my truck I think I
paid eight bucks for eight of them or so I mean they're they're really cheap um the headlights for
the truck run anywhere from 60 to 100 bucks if you want to do the LEDs and that might be worth it
at some point I think if these ever actually one of them actually burns out I'll probably take the
opportunity to upgrade but in the meantime probably not let's see so to do this on the Honda I have
to open the trunk because the the trunk lid hides the two screws that will attach the rear light
assembly I'm going to take a picture of this I guess
it's a little bit rainy and wet and cold here today but I tried to do this anyway okay here's
the tail light assembly on the Honda and I've got my cordless drill to back out these screws
I'm afraid I'm not good since I'm since I'm working by myself I'm not even going to be able to see
the result of this wasn't done I need a partner to hold down the brake pedal to see whether the
lights are working or not which is actually kind of a I should probably have somebody do this
with me because one thing I've learned about these lights is that when you first install it
sometimes it doesn't work and you have to flip it around the other way somehow the polarity
makes a difference on this and so several times I've plugged in the new light bulb only to find
that it didn't light up and then as soon as I flip the bulb around the other way it worked fine
okay so I've removed the two screws and now this light assembly on the Honda is held on by some
little tabs you just got to kind of pop it off make a nice satisfying popping noise
and I like to take a picture of that too see if I can do this one-handed
I'm not sure how well the picture is going to come out but we shall see okay which one is it
is this one to get the light socket at your turn it counterclockwise and then pull it out
and I'm trying to take a picture of the old bulb as well as the new one
okay I've got now in my hand a picture of the old bulb it's probably going to be blurry
and then I'm going to go to get it out you just pull on it but advise to do it ever so gently just
wiggle back and forth back and forth back and forth and then pull gently as you're wiggling
and out it comes tada okay the old bulb is out now I'm going to get some that there's this
goop that they say you should put on here called bulb grease and I think it helps with the
electrical connections and also helps keep it from getting stuck in there and I still have some
from the other jobs so I'm going to stick a Q-tip in there a cotton swab if you will Q-tip is a
brand name can stick a cotton swab in there to get some of this bulb grease and get one of the new
LEDs so the the new bulb that I'm putting in is going to be the one on the lower right from the
picture the one of the pictures in the show notes will be of several bulbs both halogen and
LED and this is the one on the lower right hand side oops looks like some cotton got stuck in there
all right so I'm putting the book looks like it's a little bit off kilter there once one of the
bulbs I've installed on the Honda I had to kind of unangle the contact a little bit because it was
not contacting the plug that in and maybe I can I might be able to see if this works by hanging it
around this way as long as it didn't pull that out a socket I can hang it over the side and then
go push on the brake pedal I can see whether it lights up or not what can I do to hold this up
um okay I think I see I'm gonna oh there I'm gonna just open the door and push down the brake pedal
doesn't appear to be lighting up I'm gonna try turning it around the other way
see if that does it ah there goes it's lighting up I wish I could take a picture of it from here
but it's way at the end of the car and so I guess what I'll do is I'll take a picture of it without
it being lit up but just show what it looks like now that it's in the socket
okay so the bulb is in the socket now I got to put the socket back in the
rear light fixture thingy so I just kind of stick it in there find a little groove
you whoo
I'm gonna turn this around until
that was it fit
man my fingers are freezing don't tell me it's too no this should be good
there it goes okay got it all right so that one is installed and I'm gonna put the
taillight fixture back in
got a position it just so
so the little thingy is going there the holes push it back on like that
okay and now put the screws back in god it's cold out here my fingers are freezing right now
I'm not used to this in South Louisiana it's like 35 degrees and rainy today extremely yucky
okay one screw in
and the other screw in
good deal and actually I think I'm gonna stop the recording right there because I've
gone through the whole process and there's no need for me to delay the inevitable end of the
episode by doing exactly the same thing a second time anyway I hope you guys have enjoyed that
I'm not sure how much this kind of thing really helps like your car's performance or anything like
that upgrading to led but it's kind of a fun hack that you can actually do on your car some
light fixtures are easier to get to than others I suspect these ones in the front on the Honda
are gonna be difficult just have to either find a youtube video showing how to remove the lights
on your particular model of car or look up instructions elsewhere or just kind of look at it
and figure it out yourself but not that hard and it's kind of fun and your lights are probably
at least going to be brighter and a little more efficient even if it doesn't noticeably affect
the efficiency of how your vehicle runs all right that is it for me this has been John
Culp in Lafayette Louisiana for Hacker Public Radio talk to you guys next time bye
oh hey guys sorry it's me again I I realized after I'd stopped recording that I forgot to talk
about one of the more interesting and unusual things about these led upgrades on a car
so not every one of the bulbs on your vehicle is going to be a direct drop-in replacement
for the old halogen when you at least on a lot of cars apparently from what I've read online a
lot of cars have problems with the blinkers so when I installed the new LEDs in the blinkers my
car had the same problem that many have and that's called the I think it's called hyper flash
where when you turn on your blinker it blinks really really fast blink blink blink blink blink blink
instead of the normal tempo of the blink and so to avoid that you have to install
something else and it's a like a resistor load resistors I think they call them or something but
anyway they they sell these special resistors that are specifically for putting in line between
the battery and these bulbs and one of the pictures in the show notes in my little flicker
slide show will show where I put the front blinker resistors on my truck it was not the easiest
thing to find a metal surface on which to attach them but I found one it was easier on the rear
blinkers on the truck and on the Honda I'm not really sure I will be able to find one I might
just have to stick with halogen bulbs in the Honda but I guess what happens is when you put an LED
bulb in there it takes so little current compared to a halogen that the car is under the impression
that there's no bulb in there and so it starts freaking out and so you have to put these resistors
in there to trick the car into thinking that everything is okay so anyway that's that I really
wanted to not neglect to mention the resistors because that was kind of one of the cool hacky parts
of the thing all right that's really it this time I will talk to you guys later bye
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