So you may have seen my other topic about a complete LED swap on my truck several weeks ago. Well now I've been told the LED's in my tails(brake) aren't bright enough.

My brother was following me home the other day and said my break lights are nearly impossible to see. Only way he knew i was stopping was the 3rd break light. This was during the day btw.

So my question is, is there a certain wattage LED you need so the light is bright enough to see through the red lens? Or a "special" type of LED bulb?

 

Did you buy housings or just the "bulb"? Your stock taillights uses lots of tiny reflectors to intensify the light coming from an incandescent bulb. You need an LED with A LOT of diodes to reach the brightness of a stock incandescent bulb because they don't utilize the reflectors. And if you bought housings, they are just all-around made in china with no quality control. Because they are so cheap, they do not include anything that mimics quality. No Pulse-Width Modulator, no voltage regulator, nor tantalums, nor quality LEDs! I got tired of people telling me my eBay taillights weren't working- so I built my own. My home-made LED housings use components needed to run LEDs properly and you can see the difference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjR_K...4&feature=plcp

eBay LED housings- $175
Homemade LED housings- $55

Remember- You get what you pay for!

 

No, it's not a housing. Just a bulb. Got them from autolumination. They have 44 led's.

How many led's do you think I'd need? Your tails look great. If I could do that myself, I would.

 

Each LED puts out so much. As far as differentiating brightness, they need proper control. I'm betting the only thing those bulbs have are resistors. Unfortunately, without things like PWMs or the like, you aren't going to get max brightness out of each function like I have. Your best bet is to buy another set of LEDs and see how they fare. Do you have any pics of them in your tails? It is important that they fill out the housings. I'm tired of seeing kids get those tiny LEDs with like 16 diodes and their tail lights are nothing but a tiny red dot on the interstate

 

:o What's PWM's?

You just want a picture of the bulb?

It's the 8th bulb down on THIS page.

 

A pulse-width modulator controls the duty cycle. On the board, it incorporates all the hardware necessary for a long life of LEDs- voltage regulators, potentiometer, tantalums, heat sinks, etc. It converts the trucks varying voltage from the turn/stop/running light wires into a more economic signal for the LEDs, so you get long life, with real bright output (as seen in my video).

So unless you mistakenly got 3156s, is it going to be hit-or-miss when it comes to PnP, well, anything.