H3 LED bulb - is this thing safe to use?

I have a set of compact aftermarket fog lights that run on H3 bulbs. I was thinking a set of these LED ones would turn 'em into an efficient option for running during the day as DRL.

Anyone with any advice on this, or experience running these types of LED bulbs?

Bonus: The fog lights are wired with an in-line fuse (5-amps?). Is it safe to just swap the H3 halogens out for the single or nine LED bulb?

Maybe I should change the title to "Am I safe enough to use these?"

Interesting, perhaps but them and let us know?

I saw this

http://clublexus.com/forums/showthread.php?t=330766

http://fanteks.net/index_products12-fog.html

I doubt they will be very bright. Wonder if someone here can mount some CREE on there instead?

Every time I think I've seen the stupidest cråp ever to come out of China, somebody proves me wrong.

Is this "H3 LED" bulb safe? Well, sure, in that it probably won't melt your lamps or burn up your wiring. But will it work? Absolutely not. Your fog lamps are looking for a linear transverse filament, a pseudo-point source radiating light in a lambertian sphere. These LED toys don't even come close to producing the amount or distribution of light the optics in your lamps were engineered to collect and distribute. If you're trying for LED DRLs, there are several very good solutions on the market, but just throwing an LED into any ol' lamp and calling it a DRL...doesn't work.

Well then, PIAA I will go.

PIAA = junk. Hella's units are much better.

Scheinwerfermann said:

PIAA = junk. Hella's units are much better.

Click to expand...

Care to shed light on why?

The PIAAs are toys — like most of the stuff PIAA sells, they're not built to any recognized technical standard (neither the American SAE nor the Euro/international ECE). Japan's lighting regulations are very lax. This will change in the future, since Japan has started the process of adopting ECE regulations. But for now it's pretty lax. The Japanese don't like or want DRLs; they grudgingly allow them but have a spec max of 200cd, which is less than half the intensity threshhold above which DRLs are actually effective. For reference, SAE standards call for 500 to 7000 cd from a DRL, and ECE regs call for 400 to 1500cd.

And that's without getting into the other issues with PIAA's toys: generally overpriced and underbuilt. Most of their $$$ goes into marketing, packaging and promotion; the real lighting companies spend their money on R&D and engineering (but the packaging's not very sexy...)

Valeo had a neat Cibie LED DRL sized and shaped to fit directly in place of Valeo's "FogStar" fog lamp, which is used on a whole bunch of different cars all over the world. But in typical Valeo fashion, they've made it almost impossible to actually buy them.