Off Road Lamp Help! LED or Halogen?

Hummer_Guy

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Hello, all!

I have a 2003 Hummer H2 (AKA Big Pig) that I am looking to upgrade the off road lamp bulbs on. It is a 55w light on a 12v system, with the H3 bulb. I recently took out the stock bulbs (trash), and put in Sylvania Silverstars, but they're not as bright as I would like. My next step is to get the Sylvania Silverstar ZXE xenon halogen H3 bulb (Sylvania rates it at 4300k and 1450 Lumens), and compare with Zone Tech 9-SMD H3 bulbs, rated at 6000k (No spec on Lumens. Can't get a straight answer from vendors for some reason.) Which will be brighter? (not concerned with the whiteness of the light at this point, just the sheer brightness.) Below are links to the bulbs I am considering. If you have brighter H3 bulbs to suggest that do not require converter boxes, ballasts etc, and are just plug and play, please share! Thanks. FYI, I have 14 of these off road lamps on the truck, so I need the brightest bulb offered with the lowest amount of power consumed, ideally.

Zone Tech LED Link

https://www.amazon.com/dр/B00266Z8JY

Sylvania ZXE Link

https://www.amazon.com/dр/B01DO3JLYK
 
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Sadden

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Are these oem offroad lamps? What kind of beam pattern do they have? And what kind of speeds and conditions to plan on using them in?

Anyways the best H3 I can think of is the narva +50 55w bulbs.


You could up to a 100w or even 130w bulb, but you will lose a significant amount of bulb life, would need to upgrade the wiring, and would lose some focus and distance vision due to the increased foreground light and loss of focus due to the larger filament.
 

Magio

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I can tell you from experience that the ZXE's are extremely horrible bulbs. Much dimmer than Sylvanias Silver star ultras which also aren't very great. I wouldnt even consider those.
 

idleprocess

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... and compare with Zone Tech 9-SMD H3 bulbs, rated at 6000k (No spec on Lumens. Can't get a straight answer from vendors for some reason.)
Those are going to be garbage: it's in the description 9-SMD.

A 5050 SMD package is designed to push 60mA at 3V or 180mW. Even at a positively miraculous 200 lumens per watt, that's 36 lumens per package or 324 total lumens. Quadrupling the current - which will drop the operating lifespan immensely - with an even more miraculous zero efficiency penalty gets you just shy of 1300 lumens. But in reality performance will never be this good: the LED's will perhaps achieve 100 lumens per watt - at currents <60mA - and efficiency will fall off as current ramps up.

And that's just the raw output side of things. The LED's themselves are plastered all over a tower that bears no resemblance to the filaments that your reflectors are designed for. The pattern will likely be a random splotchy wash of light in the foreground. At "6000K" (and probably colder than that) you might find it surprisingly difficult to actually recognize what's being illuminated by the "angry blue" LED's casting a ghostly pale glow.

Suspect you'd be better off investing in some of the LED bars I see on off-road trucks all the time these days. Those seem to be sub-5000K on the color temp and at least mate higher-power single-die LED's to purpose-built optics.
 
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-Virgil-

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Hi, welcome to the forum.

You're very much on the wrong track with the bulbs you're trying out (and thinking of trying). "LED bulbs" do not work, no matter what brand they are. As with "HID kits", it's an optical mismatch situation very much like putting on somebody else's eyeglasses: the lenses are for someone else's eyes, so you can't see properly. And even if there were a magical way to fix the optical incompatibility (there is not), none of the "LED bulbs" put out anywhere near the amount of light their sellers claim. It's all fraudulent.

You're also headed in the wrong direction with the Sylvania Silverstar and ZXE bulbs. See here. All of these so-called "extra white" bulbs are grossly inferior in terms of output, no matter what brand. This is a pure scam: the blue-tinted glass blocks a significant amount of the light produced by the filament; these bulbs put out much less light, not more, and there's nothing about the tinted light that improves your ability to see; in fact it does the opposite.

Basically, to meet your goal you need to disregard the babble and handwaving about color temperature ("kelvin ratings"). The highest-output H3 bulb without going to a high-wattage bulb is this one (you'll notice it does have blue areas on the glass, but the filament has a clear, uncolored window to look through so none of the useful light is blocked). High-wattage bulbs put out more light, but give poorer beam focus (shorter seeing distance) and they raise power consumption and heat production concerns.

The linked H3 bulb will be your best pick while you save up for higher-performing, lower-consuming LED lamps (designed and engineered as such from the start). The ones worth buying are not cheap, though!
 

Hummer_Guy

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Got a lot of responses here, let me see if I can try to respond to them all (Thanks for that).

-These are OEM Bosch-Pilot 160 series halogen lamps that were offered as dealer upgrades back in the day. It is my mission to install and improve all factory/OEM options on this rig, with little to no aftermarket mods to show how capable a stock H2 is, so aftermarket LED bars are out of the question. All mods need to be plug and play, and pass for stock. Hence why I am stuck with the H3 class bulbs, which is what the Bosch lights are set up for.

-The grille guard lights, and front roof lights are going to be used both at highway speeds at night, and low speeds at night in very rough terrain. Side lights are more so camping lights, or side view lights for wheeling at night. Rear lights are mainly for blinding tailgaters, also for backing up at night (flood style).

-Need to keep the OEM wiring (18 and 14 gauge wiring). I went to great lengths to obtain OEM connectors, insulators etc. to reproduce the factory harness for the side and rear lights (albeit they are OEM parts, Hummer did not offer side and rear lights from the factory), so it will be plug and play on basically any H2 on the road.

-Price isn't really an issue, I just want the brightest H3 class bulb possible to put in my rig that won't burn up the wiring. Let me see if I can figure out how to post some pics so you can see what I'm working with for reference.
 

-Virgil-

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Delta = junk, all of it.

Once again: blue bulbs of any brand are the wrong thing to do given your stated goal of maximum output. That should not be especially difficult to understand; why are you still pursuing blue bulbs?

Once again: over-spec wattage bulbs (100w instead of 55w) will run you the risk of a fire.
 

Hummer_Guy

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Why are Xenon (blue) bulbs considered junk, other than the tinted glass? I have run both Xenon and basic halogen bulbs on other vehicle before, and the Xenons appear brighter.
 

-Virgil-

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Blue glass bulbs are not "Xenon bulbs". That is a marketing lie. They're halogen bulbs with blue glass, which reduces the output significantly. The fill gas in all halogen bulbs contains a proportion of Xenon; that does not make them "Xenon bulbs". Xenon bulbs (real ones) are not optically compatible with halogen lamps.
 

Sadden

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Would I run the risk of burning up the wiring on my truck if I use a 100w bulb on what's supposed to be a 55w system? I used 14g for the ground wires, and 18g for the power.

Here's another bulb I am considering. They also have a 55w variant.

http://www.dеltаlіghts.com/?q=store...00-Watt-Xenon-Pair/p/8733455/category=2352800

Junk bulbs, the bulbs Virgil kindly linked you are the best 55w variants you can get. Really should bump up the wiring to 12g or so for the most performance though.

So what kind of beam pattern do these auxiliary lights have, many off roading lights are very floodey, and not really safe at highway speeds.
 

idleprocess

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Why are Xenon (blue) bulbs considered junk, other than the tinted glass? I have run both Xenon and basic halogen bulbs on other vehicle before, and the Xenons appear brighter.

Filament bulbs (incandescent, halogen) produce the bulk of their visible output on the red end of the spectrum. Blue-tinted glass makes the light seem whiter because by its very nature acts as a high-pass filter, meaning it cuts out much the lower-frequency output on the red end of the spectrum. This has a very real penalty on light output; the workaround to this is a hotter filament, which means more power, which will probably exceed the current-handling capabilities of an 18ga wiring harness already pushing its nominal capabilities handling ~4.5A.
 

Hummer_Guy

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These lights wouldn't be used when there is traffic present on the road. I live in an area with a high frequency of animal-auto collisions (deer, coyote, hog etc) way out in the country, so it would be advantageous for me to light up as much of the road as I can within reason (headlights are....lackluster, no pun intended), so I can see the animals coming and react accordingly. They also come in handy when on the trail at night additionally.
 

Alaric Darconville

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These lights wouldn't be used when there is traffic present on the road. I live in an area with a high frequency of animal-auto collisions (deer, coyote, hog etc) way out in the country, so it would be advantageous for me to light up as much of the road as I can within reason (headlights are....lackluster, no pun intended), so I can see the animals coming and react accordingly. They also come in handy when on the trail at night additionally.
And so why would a bulb that reduces the lighting capability of a lamp by up to 67%*​ be at all useful to you? It's a good thing you wouldn't use them when there is traffic present, those same bulbs would increase glare for other drivers by up to 33%.

There aren't too many other ways to say this: Do not use blue-tinted bulbs.

*Based on informal testing by the NHTSA using the 9004​
 

Hummer_Guy

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Bought some of those Osrams. Will report back how they compare to the stock bulbs in the roof lights and the Silverstars currently installed in the grille lights. Had to have the Osrams shipped from the UK. Are they not available in the U.S. for a decent price? The only U.S. sellers or America based eBay sellers wanted an insane amount of money for two light bulbs. (Prices ranged from $199-323 for two Osram H3s, I found them overseas for roughly $23 for a pair)

LOL

http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/161427481050?lpid=82&chn=ps&ul_noapp=true
 

Lee Dodge

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It must have been a mistake in his listing. If you look at the history it shows 37 of them sold for $22.99/pair
 
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