Plastic lens & heat from HID bulb?

[Flashanator]

I was thinking of putting some HID bulbs (80+watt @ the bulb) in a typical sedan headlamp. The lenses are plastic & use stock 55w h3 & h4 halogen bulbs per lamp. I have heard that 80+ watt HID bulbs wont produce much more heat then the stock halogen bulbs. And since some cars use 100w halogen I thought might be ok?

How do you think typical plastic lenses would go for this idea?

I'm not using these for on the road or anything. Off road.

 

[IMSabbel]

Hm. If it can work with Halogen, my first guess would be that hid should be fine, too, concerning heat.

But otoh, UV resitance might be a different issue...

 

[tay]

Well, being that AFAIK there are no 80w OEM bulbs (closest is a DL50 - 50w OEM) - it's probably an ebay kit, which brings serious doubts as to the quality control, not to mention whether or not the ballast really is 80w. OEM bulbs have a certain kind of glass around the capsule to block UV, which will wreck your polycarbonate lenses. Many kit bulbs do not. Your biggest issue is going to be beam pattern. If 35w HIDs in a headlight that isn't designed for them is a bad idea, then 80w is even less of a good idea. Even if the headlights survive the heat, they will not produce a proper beam pattern.

What headlamps are these? H3 and H4 is an odd combination... makes me think that it's a poorly designed knockoff (or possibly an integrated foglight), since H3 is mainly a foglight or ebay projector bulb, and H4 is a hi/lo.

However, if you have a 35w OEM HID setup, a few people have found that regular old 35w Philips 85122 bulbs are capable of running pretty well off of a 50w or 55w ballast. There is some reduction in life, but they still last more than halogens. Of course, the 'right' way to do something over 35w is to use a Philips DL50 fatboy, which is a kinda hard to find, expensive HID capsule designed for 50w.

 

[Flashanator]

thx for the replies guys.

Seems the uv might ruin this.

Per headlight there is a h4 & h3 halogen bulb. low beam is just the h4. And then high is the h3 + h4.

This is more closer to the kind of lamp it is. What I posted before was wrong.